In Progress: Dragon Age: Origins
Holy cow.
Holy cow.
No, wait. I can get this.
Holy cow!
I have never been a huge fan of the pause-and-command games of the tactical, top-down, RPG variety: Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, etc. I know this seems strange, since I absolutely adore a well-made turn-based, top-down strategy RPG (Final Fantasy Tactics being my gold standard), and I do love games that let me pause to issue menu and battle commands while stopped.
For whatever reason, those two interests never quite intersected for me. That is, until I started playing Dragon Age: Origins.
In the interest of keeping this review on-target, I will be ranting about Bioware, and talking about the episodic 2D Flash-based game, Dragon Age: Journeys, in their respective posts.
If you are at all a fan of Bioware, the above-mentioned pause-and-play style RPGs, or a good, story-driven, dark fantasy epic, I do not need to tell you that Dragon Age is a good game. You have likely already been playing this game to death since the release date. So, as is my usual fare, I will be trying to find some negative aspects of this game, and generally hopping all over the place as I try to encapsulate what, exactly, it is that I like and dislike about it.
Minor Flaw: Party size. I suppose, since combat can be challenging, even on the easiest setting*, keeping the number of factors you have to keep an eye on at once is a blessing. I find myself torn between which characters to have along for the majority of my romps through the towns and wilds of the game, merely because they are all equally strong, well-written, and have interesting things to say.
I suppose this - topped with the six unique backgrounds for the starting character and the multitude of endings - is one of the ways they tout having a high level replayability, but I find that the game is promising to be fairly lengthy, and I would not replay just to have a different party makeup than my first time through.
The older games in this genre did set the bar pretty high at six characters, and I feel that with the advent of the Tactics system, whereby the characters can essentially control themselves (as well as one can program them to, at least), it would offset this difficulty.
Minor Flaw: Speaking of having things to say, the main character has a lot of things to say, but no voice to say it in. Now this should be going against my earlier rant on silent protagonists because this would be a shining example of a game that does the silent protagonist trope right, except for two glaring factors.
#1 - The game asks you to choose from several voice styles at the outset. From experienced to sultry, my character has a selection of unique voice identities, that can be used - in tandem with choices made during conversations - to shape his or her identity in my mind. However, if all I am ever hearing him or her do is shout and grunt in combat, or when I issue a command, I do not get the full effect of this choice.
#2 - It’s Bioware. Come on, people. There are something like 140+ voice actors hired for this job, to ensure that NPCs, both mundane and vital to the story, have as little repetition in style as possible, and yet 10 more could not be hired to fully voice the character I am playing? I would have been more content to have the same system as in Mass Effect used, where the MC had only one voice for each gender, but spoke every line based on the dialog choices that were made.
That said, the dialog that is there is rich, well-scripted and executed, and I could honestly listen to some of the banter that occurs between characters in town and during “cutscenes” for hours.
Actually, I probably have.
Now I have to go back to it, and see how the story continues to fare, and if it is enough to make me want to play through it many, many times.
