Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 27

Game review: Project Diva f 2nd for PS Vita

Project Diva f is one of my favorite PS Vita games and remains one of the few I keep going back to whenever I need something to do for a few minutes of quick distraction. It’s also one of the few games I own multiple copies of, as I bought the English language version as soon as it became available in Europe. It’s just loads of fun to play with a simple “Simon Says” premise, and I’ve logged in well over 200 hours at this point. In my original review, I said that I might never unlock Hard mode, but I’ve been able to pass 70%, leaving only Extreme mode untouched. (Well, I did give the songs I unlocked an effort, but it was a bit like trying to dodge machine gun bullets…while swimming in a pool of molasses. In December. With lead boots on.)

I say this because I was extremely happy to see that Project Diva f 2nd would be getting an English language release relatively quickly, so I skipped the Japanese import and waited patiently, only to discover that I very much HATE the new game. I want to love it for many of the reasons I love the first, but the game steadfastly refuses to let me have fun with it. In fact it hurts me to play and insults me for not being fast enough to keep up with its unforgiving pace.

What this second game still gets right is the graphics and sound. The music is nice and varied, and the videos are all bright and flashy, if a bit surreal at times. Playing through the game on Easy mode, I frequently marveled at the number of songs available and their diverse range. There’s not quite as much variety as in the first game, but I didn’t mind losing a few of the pop metal styles in favors of some lighter synth-pop fare.

The basic gameplay is still mostly the same with only a few new additions, which don’t show up often in the Easy mode. But Easy mode is really only pressing one button, so to me, it’s like a warm up stretch before moving on to the same song in Normal. And that’s where the game fails to be fun. This is because Normal mode now has a collection of prompts that feel borderline Extreme, making it painful for me to try to keep up. You may think I’m exaggerating, but I assure you, I am not. Within 10-20 seconds of each song in Normal mode, my hand is cramping up, making it all but impossible to put in even half of the prompts blurring by on the screen. These come in with no seeming correlation of the beats per minutes, and the formerly accurate star rating system is also equally useless in determining the difficulty of any song. They’re all fuck-all hard now as far as I’m concerned.

A typical combination in the first game at the same level might ask for two or three taps of each button with a delay between shifts to another button. This second time around, the two prompts are interchanged in ways that were reserved for Hard and Extreme modes in the first game. It doesn’t help that there’s a new double scratch star, requiring taking both thumbs off the controls for a precise swipe on both sides of the screen. Scratches were previously the one area of any song that I couldn’t fail, even on Extreme mode. But congratulations, Sega, you made it impossible for me to even do a basic screen swipe without hurting my thumbs. AND, since I have to remove my thumbs from the controls, you guarantee I’ll also miss the next 3-6 button prompts as well. So now I’m rage quitting a fucking musical game on what should be one of the more forgiving difficulty levels. This is a new low in my life as a gamer, let me tell you.

In theory, I could just play on Easy forever, but I can’t do it without being angry at how little chance I’ll ever have of unlocking any songs in Normal mode. And it isn’t like I haven’t tried. I’ve wrecked my thumbs for several long nights trying to even make a tiny dent in the song list, and with only a few exceptions, I’m growling and backing out of the song within thirty seconds. Sometimes I’ll drop the Vita and shake my hands to relieve the stabbing pains, the whole time forming a colorful collection of slurs and curses at the people who thought ruining this game was a good idea.

I feel extremely cheated by Project Diva f 2nd, and I feel like I wasted my money supporting people who don’t care if the game has balance issues. Adding new features is fine, but cranking up the difficulty to the point of pain makes the game no fun at all, and nothing else can make up for that. I have to give Project Diva f 2nd 2 stars, and if this is the trend Sega plans to take with future sequels, I can say I won’t be bothering to buy any more of this series. That’s a damn shame because I really do want to like the sequel as much as I did the first Vita release. I just can’t because it fails at the most basic requirement I have for any game, to have fun playing it.

Book review: Elven Blood by Debra Dunbar

Well! That certainly started of my new year of reading with a bang! I’ve very much enjoyed the first two books in the Imp series, but Elven Blood may be the best book yet. Maybe it’s partly because the first two books have me deeply invested in Samantha already, but I also feel like this was a solid story with plenty of twists and turns, many of them pleasantly surprising.

Samantha is now the Ha-Satan, but the demons of Hel aren’t exactly bowing down to her authoritai. Actually, one in particular keeps sending hired hit men to try and take her out. The angels don’t seem to care much for her either, with the possible exception of Gregory, and they don’t seem to like what she brings to their council meetings. Well I certainly did.

I can’t discuss much of anything without spoiling this book or previous books, but I will say that this had a lot of great humor. I was frequently reading sections to hubby to explain my outbursts of laughter, and near the end, I whooped over a borrowed line from Army of Darkness. I read it to hubby, and he got a big cheesy grin, too.

I like that the romantic triangle remains a triangle, and that even if Wyatt and Gregory don’t like each other, neither is asking Samantha to make a choice to stay loyal to them. Gregory even manages to show some signs of mellowing out, and Wyatt…well he’s still delightfully himself, even though at times it seems like his faith in Samantha has been shaken.

Candy the werewolf is reduced to a much smaller role this time around, but succubus Leethu is given her own chance to develop in tawdry style. A large part of this book centers around one of her past mistakes, and Samantha has to be the one to sort it all out after Leethu begs for sanctuary and protection under the Ha-Satan.

I like how the story takes all these known qualities about angels, demons, and elves and twists it into something unique. It’s a great world to explore, and every new detail is fascinating and often humorous.

I also like how much tighter the writing is. When Samantha references something happening in the past now, I can recall what books they happened in, and I don’t feel like I’m missing a scene somewhere like I did with certain parts of the second book. Even stuff she mentions in passing, I go, “Wait, when did that…? Oh right, I remember it now.”

All in all, it’s a great story, and it gets me excited to see what happens in the next book, Devil’s Paw. I’m giving Elven Blood an enthusiastic 5 stars, and I’d recommend it to fans of dark fantasy and comedy horror.

Game review: The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth for PS Vita

I’ve been playing The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth off and on between other games, with about 20 hours put into it at this point, and I still don’t know how to feel about it. Once I’ve got it started, I might play until I drain the Vita, or I might just play one seed and put it away for later. The controls are simple enough, and the enemies have a lot of variety. But the game’s setting is…well it’s a bit awkward.

Isaac is a young child of indeterminate age, but given his dream sequences in between levels, I’m not really sure if he’s a toddler or somewhere around 5 or 6. In any case, Isaac’s mother hears a voice that says he’s God, and he doesn’t like Isaac much. So after a set of severe punishments, “God” tells her that Isaac must be sacrificed. Isaac somehow figures out that he’s about to die, and he finds a trap door into the basement level of his room and must fight through a bunch of monsters and bosses, eventually leading to a fight with his mother using his only available weapon, his tears.

Right off the bat, I find myself asking what drugs the dude who made this must have been taking. There’s a kind of biblical tone to this story, and a little bit of Carrie as well, given the “they’re all going to laugh at you” dream sequences. I find myself asking if Isaac’s mother is delusional or really hearing God. Because if all these demons and monsters are hiding out in this woman’s basement, maybe the God of this world is petty enough to ask for a child as a human sacrifice. Then again, maybe’s she’s insane and it’s just a coincidence that her house seems to be sitting on top of a hell mouth.

Isaac’s controls are simple enough to grasp. You can move using the left stick or the d-pad, and you can fire in four directions using the right stick or the face buttons. Bombs and items can be used by touching the screen or by using the shoulder buttons. It’s very simple to customize the controls to suit your own preferences as well, and I liked having the option to shift some of the controls around.

The layout of the levels is similar to dungeons in Zelda games, but with a darker, fecal-strewn theme. There’s piles of shit everywhere, and Isaac can break these open with his tears to occasionally find coins or other items. (Again, what drugs was this guy taking?)

Along with items that can be held and used with the buttons, there are also rooms with upgrades for Isaac, some of which are more useful than others. Some items give Isaac more hearts for health, while others give his tears upgrades to do more damage. Others give him an ally to help in his fights with the monsters. The placement of these items is random, so on some runs, you might get a combination of helping items that make a basement crawl less difficult. But you also might get a run where nothing is useful, or worse, where the items weaken Isaac and make fighting much, much harder. A number of items claim to increase Isaac’s luck, but if this does anything useful, I don’t know what it is. It doesn’t make finding coins or spare hearts easier. Since there’s no manual, it’s all a guessing game what any of this stuff really does. The tear upgrades at least give some visual clues to their upgrades, but a lot of the other items leave me wondering if they’re useful or harmful.

It doesn’t help that the game feels extremely stingy with items. There might be four or five locked doors or chests in a level, but you’ll only find one key. There will be dozens of places a bomb might be useful for getting extra items, but you only start off each seed with one bomb, and you might go two or three levels without finding another. This is true whether you select normal or hard difficulties, and to be honest, I couldn’t tell any difference between the two modes. They both feel equally difficult. At one point, I shifted down to normal from hard, and it actually made the bosses harder by giving them all companions. Maybe that’s a bug, or it’s a feature. I don’t know.

The game’s bosses are randomly generated, and with more runs, more bosses are unlocked. This and the randomly generated layouts of the dungeons ensures that no two runs will play the same. Additionally, many seeds will start with a handicap, like losing the Zelda style map in the corner of the screen, or making every room darker and more difficult to see enemies. It’s the kind of indie game meant to abuse the player, and there are very few seeds where you’ll find a collection of items that level the playing field. In all the seeds I’ve played, only one stands out for being generous with upgrades, giving me three companions, a large number of hearts, and a really useful tear upgrade that let me shoot through walls. More often than not, however, I ended up heading into the third and fourth levels with no tear upgrades, no companions, no extra hearts, and nothing but items that supposedly increased my luck.

Which is a big reason why I don’t know how to feel about the game. Most of the time, I feel like I’m woefully ill-equipped for a run. I still see it through to the end and hope the next seed is maybe slightly less cruel, but rarely do I feel rewarded for my perseverance.

There’s supposedly other characters to unlock, but I’ve never seen a seed where it would be possible to fulfill any of the stringent requirements to unlock them. One for instance requires holding 55 pennies. But I’ve gone this whole time without making more than 20 cents in a full run. (Most of the time, I can make it to the last level with 10 cents.) Another requires not picking up hearts for two levels, but I can’t manage to do it. Still another requires not taking damage for two levels, something I fear may never be possible no matter how often I play.

In some ways, the game feels like Spelunky for the difficulty level, but even Spelunky’s worst level still feel more generous with item distribution. This is particularly notable with the shops. In Spelunky, you’ll hit a shop that has five items, and at least one will be really useful for keeping you alive. And by the time you get there, you’ll have enough gold and gems to afford it. In The Binding of Isaac, the shop will have three items, none of which do much of anything. It’s a moot point either way because you won’t have any money to buy them anyway.

Therein lies a great deal of my difficulty in rating the game or suggesting it for others. It’s not a terrible game, but it feels like it’s been tuned to the cheap end of the gaming curve, making almost every seed feel grossly unfair. I still play them through, and I still want to play another round just to see if maybe I can get a seed that’s less painful.

But…am I having fun? Um…sometimes? Maybe? I don’t know.

I’m giving The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth 3 stars. It’s put together well, and if you’re the kind of person who likes hopeless odds and unfair cheap tactics, this might be for you. As for me, I think this will continue to be something I take in small doses between other games. Because if I tried to play this longer than a single charge on the Vita, I might find myself extremely depressed by the idea that a guy on drugs thought a story about murdering children in a shit-filled basement was a great idea for a video game.

Saying goodbye to 2014

Here we are, the last blog post of 2014, in which I look back and try to decide if it was a good year or bad. But I think I’ve already made up my mind that it wasn’t so bad for me. This is not to say it wasn’t a shit year for a lot of folks, but with me locked away in my own little corner of the world, it wasn’t so bad. For every bad little thing that I can think of, I can also think of something good that kind of balances it out. And really, it’s not possible to make it through a whole year without some bad raining on the good, right? Right, one must look for balance of the two, not an overabundance of one or the other. Expecting a year to only be good is unrealistic, and finding a year to be all bad could possibly be a sign of too much cynicism. So, split the middle and take both in moderation, is what I say.

I wrote a lot less this year. It’s due not to a lack of creative energy, though, more like a lack of energy. I napped a lot, taking away from my writing time. And now that the weather has turned cold, I find it’s very hard to stay at my desk for more than a few minutes at a time before I want to run to the living room and shut the door to bask in the glow of the electric heater. It’s taken me two days to write this post with several escapes to the living room to that out, and I don’t see that improving until March, possibly even April.

I don’t really consider this a bad thing because I have a big queue of stories to release sometime next year, and when spring rolls around, I can get back to editing and writing to keep the backlog sufficiently full. I still don’t think I want to do anything with Mystical World Wars because of a lack of interest, but I might eventually return to it just to amuse myself. The muse seems content to leave that world alone to focus on smaller series, and I’m grateful that she’s no longer the relentless task mistress that she used to be. We’re in a good place, the muse and I, so I hope to continue that trend in 2015.

For the first time this year, I’ve “won” my Goodreads reading challenge of 50 books. I squeaked by the last two this week, something I didn’t think I’d manage because I’d been distracted by lots of shiny new video games. But I got to the end of my second playthrough of Dragon Age: Inquisition and decided I could stop there for a few weeks before trying out any of the other races, classes, and specializations. I want to give hubby a chance to play it, and he’s still amusing himself with Fallout: New Vegas and the various mods he keeps adding to it.

Anyway, the nice thing about my 2014 reading list is how many 4 and 5 star books I read compared to 1,2, and 3 star books. There were 31 4 and 5 star books compared to 19 books that scored lower. It’s all luck of the draw, sure, but this year, my luck was better than most previous years. It’s certainly not because I’m lowering my standards, because I’m still quite picky about what I like. But overall, I came away happy far more often than not.

Oh, and that score doesn’t include books I reread, or stories on Wattpad. When you add in those, the news sites and various blogs, this year, I’ve read almost as much as I used to in my voracious teens. I might not have gotten to read everything I wanted to this year, but I did read a lot, and that’s got to count for something.

I got an editing job that lasted several months, and with the funds I collected from that job, I was able to buy a PS4 and several games. This was great for my review queue, but maybe not so good for my sleep cycle. Playing games seems to take a lot less brain power than writing or reading, so I could go several long hours playing “just one more quest” until the wee hours of the early morning. At one point I commented to hubby that we ought to call my PS4 the “oh shit is it 5 AM already” machine.

Also, I should mention that the cat LOVES the PS4, or more specifically the heat exhaust pouring out of the back. It runs hot almost from the moment I turn it on, so once I turn it on, I know where to find the cat. Thus the PS4 is also the “personal space heater.”

I had a positive change in my health this year, due in part to my frequent walks with the dog and cat. The exercise really does help to keep depressions at bay, and because I’m much less stressed out, I greatly reduced the number of painkillers I needed. Those I took were the kind that dissolve in a big glass of water, and because of that, my stomach has finally healed to the point that it closes at the top properly.

This does have one slightly negative side effect, in that I’ve gained a few extra pounds over the last year from eating a bit too much. During the fall, I exploded a pair of pants while visiting a local piadineria. You might think I’m joking, but I’m not. I felt a pop and looked down to see a blob of thigh sticking out of a gaping hole in my jeans, and I thought that was the worst damage. But once I got home and took them off, I discovered many rips in the hips and ass seams. So yeah, I totally killed those jeans with my newly chubby butt.

I don’t really consider this a bad thing, though. The added weight has made the winter slightly easier to bear, and aside from needing to buy two new pairs of Levi’s closer to my enlarged size, I don’t look too bad. I probably should take the diet and exercise more seriously, but I see this as a part of getting older, and I don’t mind so much. In much the same way, I don’t mind having a few extra grey hairs or wrinkles on my face. I think in a way that my body is just now beginning to match the age of my soul. Besides, it’s impossible for it to still match the age of my brain, and who wants to look 13 forever?

Looking ahead to 2015, I’m hoping to read a bit more, maybe even make it to 60 books. I think I’m about where I need to be with games and book reviews here, and while I could stand to write a few more “think pieces,” I don’t feel the need to fill the empty spaces with articles better written by other bloggers. I expect to release fewer books this year, mostly because I’m not convinced that releasing a whole lot of books in a row has much impact on overall sales. It is true that in the months that I have something new out, all my other books get a bump in sales. But it’s a case of diminishing returns, and by the third month of new releases, I’m down into single digit sales. I still need to find some secret to getting triple digit sales, I guess, but considering the ever expanding size of the writing market, I still consider it a miracle that a nobody like me sales as many books as I do.

Unlike in previous years, I don’t wish 2015 is better than 2014. If anything, I’m hopeful that it’s as nice a year as this has been. If it turns out a little better or worse, well that’s okay, too. So I leave 2014 with a fond wave, and I welcome 2015 with hope that it is as kind to me as the prior year.

To all my readers, I hope that 2014 was equally balanced for you, and if it wasn’t, I hope that 2015 brings more good than bad to you and yours.

Book review: Traitors by Carrie Clevenger

Crooked Fang was one of my favorite books this year, so I was excited to be getting back to Xan Marcelles and his complicated life. This outing however is very straightforward, and I feel a little let down. Traitors is not a bad story, but compared to the many twist and turns of the first book, it plays out pretty straightforward without any surprises. Xan is contacted about killing a group of vampires, and he does, and that’s the story.

Coming along on this bloody road trip is Nin, a vampire from the first book, who provides a bit of balance to Xan’s rough character. She’s an interesting lady, and I think she makes a fine partner for Xan. But I do admit, all throughout this book, I kept wondering, what happened to Tabitha? She’s briefly mentioned near the end, so I know she’s okay. But I rather liked her in the first book, and I was holding out hope that she might make an appearance this time around. Alas, no such luck.

The ending sets up the premise for the next book, a mission that Xan has no choice but to accept. I hope Nin will still be along for the ride in the next book, and I hope to see Tabitha again.

I give Traitors 4 stars, and I’d suggest it and Crooked Fang to fans of vampire fiction.

Game review: Tetris Ultimate for PS4

The other day I got a pleasant surprise browsing the PSN store for new games. Tetris Ultimate hit my nostalgia bone hard, so it became an instant buy as soon as I had some cash available.

You have to understand, Tetris was one of my first Game Boy games. It was the game I showed to my mother, who was always going on about games rotting the brain. But she liked Tetris so much that I had trouble prying the Game Boy from her at times. After moving back in with my dad, I showed him Tetris, and he became an instant addict as well. It’s a game with a simple premise and a wide appeal, and I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like to waste some time with it.

This Ubisoft update brings in several co-op and versus modes along with the classic single player mode. I wish I could say it was all good, but some of the modes were a little annoying. I don’t have PS Plus (yet), and so I can’t play online with other people. Ubisoft’s answer to this is a set of bots of varying skill levels. All of these are fine for a basic battle mode, but they have some problems when it comes to co-op. The problem is, they slam tiles on their side of the “matrix” without consideration of what my half looks like, or whether or not I might need the pieces they’re taking at the rate of one per second. So by the time I’ve finally managed to set up even one tetris, they’ve filled their entire side of the screen, and we lose the game around level two.

There’s also an ultra battle mode I’m not too fond of for the same reason. Any bot of any skill level will slam down pieces with ridiculous speeds, racking up points not for making lines, but for the speed of their drops. No matter how quickly I drop pieces, the robot will always have a higher score. So even if they stack all the way to the top of the screen less than a minute into the game, I can’t beat their score by the time the clock counts down. It’s kind of annoying.

I’m also not really fond of the challenges added to “celebrate” the 30th anniversary of Tetris. Make 30 Tetrises, play 30 games with a friends, and what not. Yes, I know it’s 30 years old. Stop rubbing it in.

But when it comes to the single player and basic battle modes, it’s still a great game, something I don’t think I could ever get tired of playing. And for 9.99, it’s not too hard on the wallet. So I’ll give Tetris Ultimate 4 stars. Maybe someday I’ll get PS Plus and be able to try the co-op with another human. But even if I just play the solo and basic battles modes, I can see getting a lot of mileage out of this one purchase. Obviously, I’ll recommend it to anyone who owns a PS4. It’s a great game to play in between rounds of the higher budget shooters, platformers, and RPGs.

Book review: Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater

This review is going to be shorter than my usual rambles for two very good reasons. One is more practical, in that my room is about 2 degrees warmer than the outside air, and the outside air is currently -2 Celsius. So even as I type this, my fingers are slowly freezing into curly talon-like claws. But my other reason is more that I don’t wish to spoil anything in this third Raven Boys novel, and there is absolutely NOTHING I can talk about without spoiling something. Just go read the blurbs, and then start with book one, Raven Boys. Read book two, The Dream Thieves, and then read Blue Lily, Lily Blue. It might take you a while, but the series is worth your time.

“So where are your usual complaints?” you may ask. I have none. Well, I have one minor quibble about the bad guy, but again, spoilers. And it’s really such a minor thing that I don’t feel it’s worth bringing up. There is however quite a lot I wish I could gush about without ruining the book. There’s surprising twists and revelations, an unexpected death, strong character development, dialogue so fantastic that I was reading whole pages aloud to hubby to explain my sudden outbursts of laughter, and a dreadful cliffhanger. (Dreadful because the next book will be a while coming out, and that ending will pick at me until it does.)

I had a minor quibble with the second book for drawing my interest away from the main characters and into a subplot, but this book corrects course and makes me care all over again about Blue, Gansey, Adam, and even Ronan. It’s a strong story that manages to happen very quickly while at the same time giving each of the main characters time to shine in their own unique ways.

So if I had any complaints, it is only that I now have a long, long wait before the fourth book comes out. I’m giving Blue Lily, Lily Blue 5 stars, and if you haven’t picked up the series yet, I’d highly recommend you do so. It’s easily Stiefvater’s best series, even better than the Wolves of Mercy Falls, and I loved that series. Seriously, do give this a shot, and like me, you may soon find yourself hooked.

Game review: Dragon Age: Inquisition for PS4

Most early reviews for Dragon Age: Inquistion came from a single playthrough clocking in at 80 to 85 hours. Pffft! Rank amateurs. I got the game on the first day it was available here in Europe (November 18) and have now completed a first run with a mage totaling a whopping 170 hours, started another run with a dual-blade rogue that clocked in 20 before I realized the easy mode was too easy, and another dual-blade rogue playthrough on normal mode that ran for 111 hours. While I still have other options as far as race and class go, I now feel confident in my ability to evaluate the game. A warning, though, this will be a long, long, long post, as I cannot sum up 300 hours in my usual 2,000 word limit.

You may be thinking that after putting in 300 hours on a game, I love it and will give it 5 stars. In truth, I feel extremely conflicted about this sequel. Dragon Age: Awakenings is one of my all-time favorite games, and this had a lot to live up to even before factoring in all the hype that surrounded it before release. A lot of my review will be comparing Inquisition to Awakenings, and ultimately, the sequel fails to deliver on some of the most important aspects of the original.

Let’s get the plot summary out of the way. An Ultimate Evil Bad Guy attacks a conclave set up by the head of the Chantry, Divine Justinia, and his plan to destroy everything ever is thwarted by the arrival of your character. This thwarting leads to an explosion that kills a few hundred magi, Templars, and Chantry clerics, and leaves the sky with a new gaping green asshole leading into the steamy bowels of demonland supreme, the fade, and so your character is first blamed for the whole mess. You set out with a small collection of ridiculously over-sized weapons to deal with the rift and gather a plucky and unlikely band of allies to Save The World, possibly along the way finding romance and a good bottle of hooch. Pretty standard fare for fantasy games, really.

Normally, I like to list all the things I loved, and then list the things that didn’t work for me. But this review will have a lot of buts because even the things I loved had some caveats. I’ll try to avoid spoilers as much as possible, but there will be some mild spoilers here and there.

Lastly, even with all my complaints, it would be fair to say that I plan to play this game several more times. I have yet to sample several other classes and two races, and there are choices along the many hours of plot that I would like to take another option just to see what happens. So while this isn’t a perfect game, I do think it’s worth the money given the amount of hours that can be invested in it. If you prefer reviews to only be glowing or scathing, you might want to skip this. You can also skip it if you just wanted a fast impression before running off to buy your copy. Because this isn’t a short review. No, it’s almost a small novel. If you do read it all, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

To get started, the one thing that carries over mostly intact from the first game is one of the absolute joys of playing Dragon Age, the party chatter. Even on a second playthrough and being 100 hours in, I was still hearing new dialogue from my various party members. I compare that to hubby playing Skyrim, where every five minutes his companions were repeating the exact same two lines, and I can honestly say that Dragon Age comes out as the clear winner in the dialogue department. I might have pushed through and finished each game in under 80 hours, but I loved wandering around, waiting for someone in my current four member party to say something. Among the nine companions, the one I liked to have along most often was the elf archer Sera. It’s not just because her comments are the funniest, either. She can bring out the best comments from other party members, and their conversations are the most memorable. I even put together groups that didn’t make any tactical sense simply because I wanted to see what new conversations I could unlock.

One particularly memorable combination was teaming Varric with Sera. Sera comments about how Varric’s books are boring, and Varric says that to an adventurer, they would be, and that for her, escapist literature would involve knitting. To this Sera gushes, “Ooh, knitting’s brilliant! It’s stabby sewing!” Even after another 250 hours of game play, that joke still sticks with me as the funniest thing I’ve ever heard from a fantasy character.

That said, there was one character I absolutely could not stand, and on my second playthrough, I refused to take Vivienne the circle mage along. This is because on my first playthrough, she managed to be condescending to everyone in my party, myself included, and she has nothing good to say about anyone among my advisors. Ultimately, it comes out that the only reason she joined the Inquisition at all is that she could sense a chance to further her own agenda. When I make any decisions that run counter to her needs, she’s snide and irritating about venting her frustrations. Despite being a mage, she hates other magi. She hates everyone around her, and even her personal side quest reveals a greedy side only a few minutes after a heartwarming “d’aaww” moment. So yeah, the second time around, when she said, “I’m joining your Inquisition,” I said, “We don’t need you.” And we didn’t.

Which reveals a major problem with this game. In Awakenings, the end game involves creating an A team and a B team to take on the final baddie in two stages. Your choices of companions could end up coming back to haunt you if you didn’t recruit enough members to balance out both crews. But there is no need for the extra party members in Inquisition. You aren’t hampered by not having those extra people, and you could play the game with only the first three characters of Solas the apostate mage, Varric the crossbow wielding dwarf, and Cassandra the seeker (a form of Templar internal affairs). It’s true, you’d miss out on some great party chats by going this route, but that’s the only reason to have these people along for the trip. You don’t have to worry about making a big final assault with any of these people like in the first game, so there’s no pressure in the decision to take or leave a companion out of a campaign.

This leads to another major problem, the role play aspect of the game. Awakenings was to me the first true role play video game I’d played because my dialogue choices could lead to vastly different outcomes. But eight times out of ten in Inquisition, I could choose any answer and still get the exact same response from people. The times that were different, I usually got one added sentence of reaction before the other person went right back to the same scripts. And really, that’s a fucking tragedy because it removes that feeling that my decisions affect the story. It kills the role play feeling that the first game had, and it makes my decisions feel less important.

There are some exceptions to this. In particular, the dialogue decisions I made with Leliana in the first campaign led to her being a very dark character. On my second playthrough, I specifically looked for options to turn her around, and at a key point in the game when it became clear that I had convinced her to embrace her humanity, I let out a loud “WOOHOO.” (No, seriously, hubby even scolded me for being too loud in my celebrations.)

Problem is, this kind of arcing decision making doesn’t expand to the major plot. It only applies to a few characters among your advisors. Even the companions end up being kind of disappointing on this point because your answers don’t do much to change their perception of your character.

Another comparison from Awakenings is the system of approval, and here, Inquisition did away with one of the sillier aspects of that. If a companion was mad at you in the first game, you could just buy them some gifts to get their approval rating back up. Say something stupid? Well you can overcome it with cakes and trinkets. I’m glad to see that go, but I’m less happy that the approval indicator was removed. Throughout the campaign, I might see a list of names ranking my decisions like:

Cassandra approves

Solas disapproves

Varric greatly approves

Sera greatly disapproves

But there’s no way to tell where I stand with each companion on the character record, and if I go to talk to the party members after each major decision, they don’t seem to change their dialogue all that much regardless of whether I pleased or displeased them. Again, this strips out that role play element that made the first game so appealing.

I do like that the romance options are now more varied. In addition to the companions, the main character can court their advisors and even a field scout, an adorable dwarf with freckles that I have sworn one day to take more seriously for an elf/dwarf pairing. Not everyone is an option, though, as some companions are straight and will turn away flirting from a character of the same sex. Another companion is gay and will politely but playfully turn away a suitor of the opposite sex. On both my playthroughs, I ended up with the diplomat Josephine because I genuinely liked her personality. She’s smart, pretty, and exceedingly optimistic, something sorely needed to help balance out all the doom and gloom cast around by everyone else. On later attempts, I plan to do a Qunari warrior and will attempt a romance with Iron Bull, my Qunari companion, and then I’ll go back to my preferred race, elf, and try wooing Scout Harding. It doesn’t do much for the overall plot, but it does make the game more fun to balance end of the world drama with a bit of light-hearted romance.

You cannot, sadly, romance more than one character. But hey, baby steps. Maybe by Dragon Age 6, we’ll get a nice polyamorus romance option.

Let me get back to the plot, which can be summed up as “Okay, we humans are all dicks, but if you don’t save us, the world will end and we couldn’t keep being dicks!” I really wish I could say something nicer about this, but all of the little notes and journal entries I gathered on both playthroughs only serve to confirm that the humans deserve this karmic ass kicking, and by stepping in to save them, I’m basically allowing them to continue their mindless path of genocide, fratricide, and general fuckery.

This really rubs me the wrong way precisely because on my second playthrough, I went to dragonagekeep.com to import a custom world, only to discover that none of my more positive choices could be imported over. So I couldn’t remind the game that King Alistair gave the circle of magi in Ferelden independence from the Chantry. I couldn’t get an option for Alistair giving the Dalish elves a large chunk of land to call their own. There’s no mention of King Belhen abolishing the casteless system and beginning a new era for dwarves. All positive changes I made in the first game seem to have been ret-conned out to make this exceedingly cynical outcome where humans have perpetually defaulted to their worst possible traits.

And the plot is all humans all the time. In Awakenings, a major part of the plot was recruiting the other races to fight the bad guy. To do this, one had to travel to Orzammar, home of the dwarves, to resolve their royal woes, and then venture to the Kocari Wilds to help the Dalish work out a little werewolf problem. But this time around, the closest you’ll get to the Dalish involves a tiny traveling group whose fetch quests can all be done in under an hour. And the only time the dwarves come up at all, it’s as a set of THREE side missions on the war table. You never get to see anything of Orzammar, although the game is littered with caves that lead to older abandoned thaigs. The rest of the time, it’s all humans. And in most cases, the humans you’re saving are shitty people who deserve their circumstances.

Based on this interpretation of the world, I expect that by Dragon Age 6, there will be no other races, only humans, and those humans will have murdered off all the magi before turning on each other. The classes of character will be politician, royal douchebag, or filthy commoner, and all three classes of humans will briefly have to come together to prevent a disaster that they themselves set in motion, but will eventually find an outside source to blame rather than admit they’re all a great swinging bag of dicks.

I have to wonder if the reason we didn’t see any dwarves or elves is due to some forthcoming DLC packs to address these areas, but as it stands now, the game’s lack of diversity is a major sticking point for me. Yes, there are a lot of dwarves and elves in the story. Most are outcasts or slaves to the humans. And yes, the game does a much better job with respect to the racial diversity of humans. I remember early on in the first playthrough crowing “Woot! Black archer!” because of the brief on-screen cameo of one of Leliana’s agents, and I was happy to see people of olive and black skin colors in a larger ratio than the first game. I was also happy to see the inclusion of a trans character and a gay character. These are all positive advances, and I’m happy about that. But I still can’t get over the fact that the plot completely ignored the dwarves, elves, and qunari and mostly sticks to my need to save the humans from their own stupidity.

“Zoe, this is a real sticking point for you, isn’t it?” Yes, it really is. It may be because the exact same excuse is used over and over to explain why so many people are working for this ultimate evil. “What other choice did we have?” they all invariably exclaim when questioned, and that’s nothing short of pathetic. I have a dilemma, and I think my only option is to do the worst possible thing? “Well I’ve got this problem, so the only solution is to ally with a dude who wants to destroy the world.” This might not bug me if it was just one or two groups falling into this camp, but EVERY group going with the same excuse…man, it just stinks.

And once you rescue any of these groups, right afterwards, they go right back to the general fuckery. There’s still the big baddie to defeat, but with their own problems solved temporarily, fuck it, why not go back to the same petty infighting?

*Takes deep breath* I would be remiss not to talk about the war table. Here, you are given a host of tasks to assign to one of your three advisors, spymaster Leliana, diplomat Josephine, or massive superdick Cullen. In theory, this is a nifty idea because you can send out people to do your bidding while you head out to areas and handle the on the ground killing and looting. Each mission has a timer that counts down even when the games is off, and the time can vary from a few minutes up to a whole day. Missions can have several outcomes depending on who you send, and some can be disastrous. So it’s important to look at more that just who can get the job done in less time.

The problem here is, nothing that happens on that war table has much connection to the game. During my first playthrough, I ended up backing up a full 30 hours to an older save because a decision by Cullen had led to the death of my entire Dalish clan. Now the thing I want to point out is that I did not back up due to that decision or the outcome. I backed up because of the complete lack of reaction to that outcome. Let that sink in…my whole fucking clan was wiped out due to a tactical error by Cullen. I went to see him immediately thereafter, and he…invited me to play checkers. No apology, no, “I’m sorry your clan is dead.” And my own character is so happy she could possibly break out in a Thedas rendition of Zippidy Doo Dah. Her whole clan died, but so what? It doesn’t fucking matter. This pretty much describes every mission on the war table. It’s a good idea, but it’s attached so loosely to the main game that nothing you do there matters.

Okay, so that’s the plot, the side quests, and the companions covered, and I still haven’t got to the actual meat and potatoes of the game, which is the killing and pillaging. I’ve seen countless reviews praise the changes in the game play, and they’ve called the companion AI “serviceable.” To that I have to ask, “Are we even playing the same game?”

Now don’t get me wrong. After you’ve got a party into the level 12 to 20 range, a lot of the bigger issues fall away. Your companions are all dumb as fence posts, but with enough hit points and special abilities, they can overcome their blinding stupidity. But it’s impossible not to see this system as a downgrade from the first game, and the sheer lack of options in the tactics menu is a constant source of frustration for me.

Remember how I said I tried the dual-blade rogue on easy mode? I did that because my companion of the same class, Cole, was constantly dying even after being given better armor and a slew of new abilities. I incorrectly assumed that this must be the hardest class of all my options, and so I scaled back the challenge level. But what I instead discovered is that Cole’s AI methodology is almost the exact same tactics as a warrior. So he doesn’t try to flank that heavily armored baddie. No, he just stands right in front of this brute and lets said baddie bash his face in with a massive hammer. It’s no wonder he dies in a few hits. He’s too fucking stupid to live.

Armed with the exact same abilities, I became an unstoppable whirlwind of death. I thought perhaps this was due to my playing the easiest setting, so I started over. But no, even with the added challenge, a dual-dagger rogue can fuck up whole groups on their own. I got so cocky, I was using the grapple hook to lunge far ahead of my companions, and by the time they caught up, I’d have killed all but one or two baddies all by myself.

I wish I could say it was just Cole who was stupid, but no. Magi and ranged rogues will also try to stand toe to toe with their enemies. No one will run to make space unless I go into the tactics menu and tell them to run, and even then, they may just run right back to where they were. I can’t set up ambushes because Hold Position doesn’t mean what I think it does. I might tell my whole crew to hold positions, sneak into an enemy fort, and turn around to find those stupid bastards are right behind me. I might want my magi to cast barrier on my tank, but even telling them to defend her, they’ll cast barrier on me instead, leaving my warrior to die a messy death while I had no need for the barrier anyway.

And the biggest change that drives me bonkers is NO HEAL SPELL. Time and again, I see reviewers spewing bullshit like “It makes for a more aggressive play style.” NO. It makes the game’s early stages exceedingly fucking tedious, and it makes some of the later boss fights a major pain in the ass. It doesn’t help that the potions meant to replace heal spells are capped for all party members, or that your companions will suck down too many heal potions like they’re Gatorade on a hot summer day. Time and again, I’d get stuck at a certain point and find myself growling, “this wouldn’t be a problem if I just had a fucking heal spell!”

Let me outline the problem in more detail. I start out at a camp with 8 potions, and my goal is a dungeon not far too away. I step five feet out of the camp and am immediately set upon by two great bears, a regular bear, three mabari hounds, and a pair of bandit rogues. I deal with all of that and check my stocks, and oh shit, I’ve only got two heal potions left. Right, back to camp! So then I can step foot out of the camp and be assaulted all over again. I might get lucky and make it all the way to the dungeon using only a few potions, but halfway through, I’ll have to walk all the way back to the entrance, fast travel to the camp, resupply potions, and then walk all the way back to the dungeon. FUCKING TEDIOUS!

And I really have to harp on what a stupid fucking decision this is from a story standpoint as well, because it’s already been established that any mage from any class can use a heal spell. The NPC magi are still the healing class for everyone else. BUT MY MAGI DON’T KNOW HOW TO HEAL? WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK IS THIS GODDAMNED BULLSHIT! FUUUUUCK!

*Takes long, slow breath*

And then there’s the perks system, which I cannot understand the point of. In addition to experience points, accomplishing missions earns another kind of XP called influence. By leveling up influence, you can unlock certain perks. This may be unlocking an additional 4 healing potions (FUCK YOU VERY MUCH), added inventory space (Which isn’t all that useful), extra experience points for defeating enemies or unlocking codex entries, or allowing rogues to pick fucking locks. That’s right, the most basic skill a rogue should have in their skill set is now tied to a perk system that requires unlocking three other items before it becomes available. The whole point of even having a rogue in the party is picking locks, and they can’t even do it until they’re around level 10. WHY? DEAR SWEET LORD, WHY FUCKING BREAK WHAT WASN’T FUCKING BROKEN?

Let’s set all that aside.

Thedas, or the human controlled sections of it, are a large playground full of fetch quests and dungeon crawls for you to explore. You’ll have to seal demon rifts, route out bandits and rogue templars and magi, and find corpses. Because the vast majority of the time, when someone asks “can you look for ____ for me?” you can be sure they’re a crispy corpse now. The few times they aren’t it’s a massive relief to find them alive.

There is a lot of variety to the landscapes of these massive areas. You’ll see barren deserts, snowy mountain regions, lush forests, rocky coastlines, and all the time, you will stop and gaze in awe at how very beautiful it all is. I know I often just stopped moving to do slow pans and take in my surroundings because it’s all so breath taking and worthy of reflection.

It’s a shame, then, that your tools for exploring, the compass and map, are so fucking useless. The map might say an area is one long and continuous stretch of forest or desert, but you will quickly discover that there is in fact an obstacle preventing you from crossing from point A to point B without walking miles out of the way. The path to your objective may also involve a single choke point gap that’s hidden from view, requiring hours and hours of wandering in circles to find. And it will be this exact moment when your companions go mute, leaving you with nothing to do but wander, fuming at a map that won’t tell you where to go, and a compass that doesn’t show anything besides the checkpoints.

You might see a spot that looks like you can jump over it, because they do give you a nice new jump button. The incline doesn’t look too high or too steep, and you infer from the texture that it is safe to climb. But no, you’ll either slide right back down, or you’ll discover that this open world has a shit load of invisible walls forcing you to take only one path to your goal. Who thought this was a good idea?

The reason my first game clocked in so many hours is because I had to wander aimlessly for many, many hours in some areas, the whole time groaning “God, this is so fucking boring!” On my second playthrough, I knew where to go, generally speaking, so I didn’t have to do nearly as much aimless searching. But even then, several areas are made in such a ridiculously convoluted way that its easy to get lost.

And there’s pathways in the game that just don’t make sense. You might need a mage to “energize” boulders or planks to make a bridge, for instance. See this enough times and eventually the question comes up: “But if they can levitate two-ton boulders to build a bridge, why can’t they just levitate party members across the gap?” And the stupid doesn’t stop there. Warriors will be needed to bash open stone walls at various points, but a locked door on an abandoned shack will be too strong for them to get in. Guess that giant ax that can split stone is just no good for cutting dry, rotting wood, yeah?

And then there’s the shards. This is a game-long fetch quest which is accompanied by the most ridiculous and flimsy story possible. Ancient shards are hidden all over the world, some of them somehow being hidden in abodes which are less that a decade old. To find these shards, one must look through a glowing skull on a post with a gem in the eye socket, and another in the back of the head. VERY late in the game, you learn that it was the main bad guy’s magi who installed these skulls, but it never gives any explanation for why they didn’t use them or why nobody else noticed them and stole the gems. Finding enough shards eventually unlocks a new area to “study” the shards, leading you to a vault where the various shard pieces are used as keys to unlock a mausoleum. With each tomb you move into and pillage, you get a very slight bump in elemental resistance for fire, ice, and spirit. That’s it. All this ancient epicy bullshit leads to a piddling nothing of a reward.

But then, this is a recurring theme with the dungeons of the game. Each time, the story says, “The big baddie is hunting for a powerful weapon around this dungeon, and we must get it before they do!” So you go through all these various fights to reach the inner chamber, a room supposedly no one has been in for a hundred years or more, and what’s your reward? More of the same junk you can find in chests scattered around the surface. Like someone else raided the tomb, took all the epic good shit, and then left some shitty placeholder items. It’s the Thedas Indiana Jones, but instead of leaving behind a bag of sand when he takes the golden monkey, he left his dagger and armor.

In only two cases is the prize for a dungeon not more of the same junk, and in the first case, what you find is a scroll detailing the history of the massacre that led to the humans’ genocide and enslavement of the elves. This worked for me. Not the excuse the humans used for centuries of prejudice, but the idea that the item at the end is not a powerful weapon at all. It’s just a scroll with some old story in it. That said, why would these ancient people go to all this trouble building a maze for a library book?

The other exception leads to some epic loot, for once, but the puzzle to get there had me commenting, “And this is why the ancient elves were murdered by the humans. Instead of building defenses of their borders, they spent all their time making a stupid floor puzzle to unlock a church door.”

This is something I really can’t get away from, the sheer stupidity of most of the fetch quests. They don’t add anything to the plot, and with few exceptions, they all feel awkwardly shoehorned on. It’s like, “We can’t have a role-play game without optional fetch quests, so we have to force these into the game somehow.” And with relatively few exceptions, they do it badly.

What’s more interesting are the side quests given out by your companions and advisors. Many may not even require combat, but they help unravel some of the mysterious backgrounds of your friends. Only one of these was a disappointment (Vivienne, what a shock), one was quite shocking (no spoilers), and several were memorable because they helped make my companions feel truly alive. I could see doing these side quests every time I play, because they’re easily the most interesting sections of the story.

This is not to say I would mind playing through the rest even with my many, many complaints. Yes, the combat is finicky until you’re past level 12. Yes, most of the quests are kind of dumb and give disappointing equipment. But there are many times when in the midst of the battles, I find myself having a good time. It might come because one of my companions does something cool, or it might be a new combo that we do that feels satisfying.

So that’s the whole review, yeah? No.

I want to bring up the combat and leveling system because I had quite a few frustrations with it and with how little sense of progression I felt fighting the various enemies. Let’s say that for whatever reason, I stumbled into a fight with anything that’s maybe one or two levels above my party members. Well that will always end badly because the enemy attacks become instant death when they connect. But the same cannot be said for the opposite situation. Going back to take on lingering enemies, even those who are six and seven levels below my character required a significant fight to overcome. It’s true that their damage output didn’t have as much of an impact once I had more hit points, but none of my leveling or weapons upgrades ever gave me the kind of power that my enemies have.

In Awakenings, there’s an early encounter with an ogre that puts up a high level of challenge, but once your party levels up, an ogre becomes progressively weaker. At a certain point, they send you up against three and four ogres, even an alpha ogre, and you feel like a badass for being able to swat them down with your beefed up abilities.

That’s never the case with Inquisition, and it drove me nuts that I never felt like my increasing levels had much of an impact or a sense of progression. This also becomes frustrating when going back to old areas because not only do the fights feel just as tedious, but you don’t get any experience points for winning. The loot you’ll get is the same low-level crap, so there’s little satisfaction to fighting.

Then there’s the status effects of abilities that don’t seem to work. Fire spells are supposed to make the enemies panic, or horror is supposed to send them fleeing, but most of the time, they just keep attacking without any feeling of weight to your actions. If an enemy is smashing your characters in the face, you will stop your attack and recoil from the impact. But the same is not true with your attacks on the enemies. I can hack away at an archer with no armor besides cloth, and that fucker will calmly continue to fire arrows with no pause. He’ll do it even if he’s on fire, even if he’s had horror cast of him, and even as my character buries a dagger in his face.

And the rules of combat don’t make much sense. I frequently noted how a warrior wearing heavy armor and carrying a gigantic war hammer could move faster than my lightly armored rogues, so it wasn’t possible to outmaneuver an enemy even if the bastard should have been much slower.

Enemies can see through walls. This drove me nuts because I might lead an enemy away from a downed companion, go into stealth and return to revive my friend, and even with several walls between me and them, the fuckers ran right back to me the moment I slipped out of stealth.

Don’t even get me started on the larger enemies and their cheap tactics. The giants who can leap across the screen and hurl boulders from out of nowhere for 6000 points of damage, or the random druffalo and gurn who suddenly go aggressive without provocation and activate their ARMOR SPELL. But the worst cheap tactics come from the dragons. These guys can armor up, cast instant death spells, and heal from the most grievous injuries. You can attack their legs and make them drop for a few seconds, but they get up and turn nimble again despite you hacking their legs for half an hour. It’s a miracle!

The story says these dragons haven’t yet been able to breed, but several of them can screech to summon an unlimited supply of dragonlings, and that screech renders every party member stunned, leaving them open to attacks from both the dragonlings and the dragon. There is no way to handle these fights without exacting micromanagement of all party members, and even then, party members will ignore orders and rush under the dragon’s mouth, like they’re suicidal and crying, “Please roast me and eat me!”

Making a long story short, which I’ve failed to do, companions are dumb as dirt, and the enemies don’t play by the same set of rules. It is possible to play without keeping track of every party member much later in the game, but during the early levels, you can’t do anything without having to struggle to keep your people from committing suicide. And I have to say again, a lot of my frustrations would have been eliminated if I could have just given my magi a simple fucking heal spell. How is any of this an improvement on the previous system?

Let’s talk about the crafting system and the merchants. Putting it simply, most of the merchants are overpriced, and anything you craft will be infinitely better than anything they sell. For that matter, even the most epic loot you get from fighting bosses will pale in comparison to what you can craft. You’ll find schematics for armor and weapons in various ways, and while you might need to purchase a few plans to get the right combinations of armor legs and arms, the vast majority of the time, you’ll find the same items out in the field with a little patience and searching. The dragons you slay do have some fairly nice unique items, but from a stats-based standpoint, you can make better stuff. The only reason to use these items is that they look cool, and you cannot make them yourself. By the end of both games, all my crew had on armor and weapons that I crafted for them, and the bonuses they got from my stuff was WAY better than anything I’d find in the field.

Which then brings up the merchants again, because they will buy shit items for a lot more than your crafted items, regardless of the quality. A base armor with no arms and legs might get you 300 gold, while that totally badass armor with a billion stat bonuses will get you 5 gold. It’s fucking stupid. Really, really fucking stupid, and it makes no sense. I ended up dumping a ton of items for gold, and where I ended up spending most of it was on a vendor who sold contracts to boost my influence. The rest of the merchants don’t sell anything worth bothering with.

Herb crafting is not really crafting at all. It’s another form of currency. You need to find X amount of a certain herb to unlock better potions, and your optional potions, tonics, and grenades all require spending other herbs to keep in a good supply. So you spend a lot of time picking up plants just to make sure you can keep using your potions. You can’t buy the completed potions with gold, but you can buy the herbs with some vendors at ridiculously overpriced…prices. No, it’s really just better to pick the shit yourself than to spend 20 to 40 gold on herbs.

A lot of the design changes in this game were supposedly made to dumb down the decision making process and make it less daunting, thus opening up the game to a wider market of players. But despite this effort to make the game more accessible, the lore is handed out in a way that assumes one has played the other games, and many of the terms used are given no real explanation other than codex entries. Even then, without playing the first two games, you’d need to read a lot of external sources to get up to speed. The codex entries in game can be pretty fascinating, but you have to pause the game and go into the menu system to find them.

One of my minor gripes has to do with the level loading screens. See, for a few seconds, the game will put up three parts of the codex that you’ve unlocked. This will be just enough time to read a sentence or two, and then the screen will go black for an additional 20 to 30 seconds of nothing happening. So…why can’t they just leave up the codex entries instead of the black screen? At one point, hubby complained, “Hey I was still reading that,” and I replied, “Yeah, so was I, but the game doesn’t care.”

The codex itself is not very well organized. One of the many things you can unlock is a copy of a book written by Varric, Hard In Hightown. I made it a point to unlock all of the chapters before reading it, only to discover that the codex had all the chapters listed out of order. So it was a pain just to sort out what chapters I was still missing, and an even bigger pain moving around to read them all.

Another gripe has to do with the inventory system. There’s no place to store extra stuff that you might need later. This is really stupid because 20 hours into the game, you get this giant castle with a cavernous bedroom, and yet, there’s no wardrobe for storing extra outfits. This might not seem like a big deal, but let’s say you wanted to craft armors with specific elemental resistances for fighting the dragons. You can’t because you don’t have room to store it even after upgrading your inventory to the highest levels. It’s also a serious pain to get a badass weapon that’s level 13 when the character you want to give it to is level 8, because you’ll be carrying around all this stuff you can’t use, forcing you to sell or destroy lots of good useful equipment just to make room for more stuff. And here’s castle Skyhold, where you have a room dedicated to the boozes you can unlock but never drink, but you don’t have a single treasure chest to store extra loot in.

And lest I forget to mention it, almost none of the locations you visit feel like habitable cities or villages. Trips to Val Royeaux make this detail more glaring. Here’s this Orlesian city full of people, taking in the merchants or visiting the open cafe or what not, and then there’s everyone else, living in burned out ruins and flimsy shacks cobbled together over the ruins of previous stone buildings. You never see Orzammar in all its gloomy splendor, only ruins of old Thaigs. You rarely find any human settlement that isn’t a junk heap. Even after renovation work on Skyhold is supposedly done, you’ll still find whole sections of it in shambles with stones laying out on the floor in the same position as when you first arrived.

For that matter, this doesn’t feel like a world where anyone could live, regardless of their skill level. Setting aside the demons and dragons, even the local wildlife is so hostile that I doubt your average farmer could live more than a week. Even a battle hardened soldier might not make it a day or two longer than the farmers before something kills them. You find these huge encampments of refugees all complaining, “We can’t do anything for ourselves now that trouble’s broken out!” But looking around, I have to wonder how anyone could live in this world even in times of peace. The vast majority of the humans are pathetically weak, so how did these nobodies rise to power and slaughter the elves with all their super powers? How did they slay all those dragons when just one sends them scurrying for the hills? How can these pathetic people be related to the same race who supposedly conquered the world multiple times? These people don’t even seem to be capable of building basic huts in the middle of a forest, so how can I believe that in the past they were so mighty?

And lastly, why are the other races given such short shrift in this world? The Inquisition is supposed to be about accepting everyone into a new movement to change the world, but why is it only the humans who get to have a part in this story? Even the Grey Wardens, the heroes of the first game, are relegated to a few side missions on the war table, and if a custom game makes your first character available, all they really do is send a letter to the Inquisitor that reads “I’m off doing very important stuff and cannot be bothered to help you save the world from an ultimate evil. Toodles, The Hero of Ferelden.”

So where are the other Qunari? Where are the elves, both the alienage and Dalish varieties? Where are all the dwarves? How is it that a game can span twice the length of the first adventure and still be so myopic in its depiction of the various races?

So, what we have in conclusion is a game with a massive world to explore, and that frequently leaves me wanting more because these things were options in the previous installments. The larger plot involves a super-badass bad guy who’s constantly incompetent, and a lowly nobody rising to become the chosen one for four kingdoms worth of selfish ingrates. Even when you set the character to insist they’re not the chosen one, the game will never let anyone else accept this. You must be the chosen one, because if it’s all just random circumstance and there is no Maker, the world would be a scary place. Or scarier than it already is, really.

And what feels like the most glaring omission is that sense of weight to my decisions. I don’t feel like I’m playing a role play game when any answer I give leads to the exact same outcome. Okay, the story isn’t that bad, but when you go from Awakenings to Inquisition, it’s a major change from having every answer be important to only having a few answers carry any weight.

So, I hated the game, right? Well no, I didn’t. I felt hampered and frustrated constantly by several design choices, and I was underwhelmed by the lack of variety in the plot and the outcomes. But still, I’ve put in 300 hours on two campaigns, and I can see putting in more time to explore other classes, races and specializations. I can say it’s worth the money, and I can say that a lot of what I did was fun and entertaining.

But when it comes to a score, I just don’t know what to give Dragon Age: Inquisition. It doesn’t help that there were a LOT of bugs and glitches throughout both my campaigns. A patch came out at the start of the month that fixed some of the cut scene issues, and that was a major headache the first time through. Cut scenes might freeze up, requiring a restart, or forcing me to skip them entirely, meaning I had no clue what I was missing. Other times, they outright crashed the game. The patch did correct this, so the second campaign was slightly less buggy. But that still left a lot of random glitches and crashes, all of which left me growling and moody for a while. The autosave happens frequently enough that I never lost much progress from a crash, but it’s still something to keep in mind.

Again, it’s hard to give a numerical score for this. The graphics and sounds are fantastic. The side quests and companion chatter are still just as good as the first game, and it is possible to uncover new stuff I missed even after playing the same sections multiple times. I still have yet to explore all the options available, and I can honestly say that the story had enough twists that connect back to the previous games that I was frequently surprised in a good way.

I just…I wanted more. I wanted more elves and dwarves. I wanted more Qunari. I wanted more options in my dialogue, more options in controlling my party, and more impact from my growth in the game. This game is dumbed down in several ways, and I find myself wanting the same options I had in Awakenings.

BUT…but I did spend 300 hours playing this, most of that spent awake until 4 and 5 AM in the pursuit of “just one more quest.” I did spend a lot of time just gawking at the scenery. I spent even more time hanging around to listen to NPCs chatter to each other. I spent a lot of time in the pub listening to the bard sing, and even if it bugs me that she’s the same bard in every single pub location like some kind of singing time lord, I did enjoy listening to her. So even though I want to give this a 2 or 3 star rating based on the shortcomings, I’m going to give it 4 stars. It isn’t everything I wanted out of a sequel, but it’s still a massive world that invites exploration. Just be patient with it, because it will require a lot of patience to get properly invested in.

Book review: Scarlet by Marissa Meyer

By a strange coincidence, I started playing The Wolf Among Us after I began reading Scarlet, the second of the Lunar Chronicles trilogy, so I ended up being entertained by two modernized interpretations of the big bad wolf. In The Wolf Among Us, Red only gets a passing mention, while in Scarlet, she’s one of the stars. I think because of that, Scarlet ends up being the stronger of the two interpretations.

Scarlet builds on Cinder, and so chapters bounce between Linh Cinder and the new characters. While Cinder tries to keep ahead of the police and the military with the help of a new ally, Captain Thorne, a space pilot who deserted and stole a gigantic cargo ship, Scarlet Benoit is just starting on her own journey to locate her missing grandmother Michelle, who is also a former military pilot, and who vanishes only a few weeks before the start of the story. Already the police have given up the case, but Scarlet finds a possible lead in a street fighter named Wolf. He agrees to help her, and they set off with several Lunar agents on their tails.

Eventually all these characters meet up, but in between, Scarlet learns several things about Wolf that make it hard to trust him. Despite this, she also feels drawn to him, just as he is drawn to her. This was for me the best part of the story, the conflict and tension between Scarlet and Wolf. Cinder’s journey with Captain Thorne is certainly entertaining, but at times their chapters almost feel like padding between Scarlet and Wolf’s. I’d reach a point where the narration switched characters and felt frustrated because it was getting away from the good stuff.

If there’s any weak points in this book, it’s in Emperor Kaito, formerly Prince Kai in the previous book. In the last book, his ascension to the throne was immediately followed by the growth of a backbone, leading him to stand up to Lunar supervillain Queen Levanna twice. But in this book, he mostly wrings his hands and whines “What can I possibly do?” to his advisers. He isn’t smart enough to connect the dots to who Cinder really is, or why Levanna wants her, and he’s fairly wishy-washy in his few chapters. He comes off as a damsel in distress, and lacks any personality or inner thoughts to make him more than a cardboard cut-out. In a cast full of interesting characters, he’s just given a few lines to remind you he’s there.

My other complaint is more minor, in that this plot reminds me of The Lord of the Rings. There’s an easy, obvious way this whole thing could have been resolved in one book. But instead we’re taking the long path because this way the writer can make up a world where Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rapunzel can all meet and fight Maleficent. It can’t be an epic save the world tale unless everyone involved agrees to not bring up the obvious, something that had been mentioned in the first book as common knowledge. I can’t elaborate further without spoilers, but it does seem kind of silly to me that Kaito could talk about this very thing in book one, and still not put two and two together in book two. It’s even sillier that Cinder didn’t just use the common knowledge to her advantage instead of going on this lengthy “road trip”.

Anywho, it’s not a bad story, and I’m looking forward to reading the third entry, Cress. So I’ll give Scarlet 4 stars and recommend it to fans of fairy tales and sci-fi.

Game review: The Wolf Among Us for PS4

I have really mixed feelings about The Wolf Among Us. This is my first time playing a title from TellTale Games, as I don’t have any interest in The Walking Dead. I’d heard the controls weren’t that great, but that the company did a great job telling a story in an episodic format. I was intrigued with their take on the Fables world, and I had planned to get this for PS Vita when it became available as a full game rather than wait for episodes to come out for the Xbox 360. But since I got my PS4, I figured, why not check it out on my nice pretty big screen TV?

The first episode didn’t quite wow me, and several times, hubby muttered from his usual spot by the Mac that one character of the other was a real dick, something I couldn’t disagree with. However, by the second episode, hubby was pausing his game to sit and watch me play, something he’s never done with any of the games I’ve played. The mystery elements and the good voice acting helped draw us both into the plot, even if we didn’t like most of the characters.

The basic premise is that all of these fictional characters moved to Fabletown, a subsection of New York, I think. And apparently, life in the human world has made everyone into major assholes. There’s really not a single likable character in the cast, making the introduction somewhat rough. But after the sheriff, Bigby Wolf, breaks up a fight between his old nemesis Woody the Woodsman and a prostitute, that prostitute turns up dead, and Bigby has to solve the mystery of who killed her and why.

(I’m pleased to say, I had the right angle from the first episode.)

While the story was compelling, I had a hard time playing the game at multiple points. First of all, I’m not real fond of the dialogue options being on a fast timer. Some of the choices gave me longer than others, but a few ran on such a short timer that I didn’t even get to read them before the game selected a default choice for me. I also am not thrilled with quick time events used for the fight sequences. No, that’s too mild a statement. I fucking loathed the game’s use of QTEs. “Press up on the stick! Hit triangle! Now rapidly tap X, and then hit triangle! Move the cursor over a target and hit right trigger!” Feh! I hate this showing up a few times in games with better controls, so having this being the controls scheme for all the actiony bits was like spending time in a personal circle of hell. The only time I didn’t hate the controls was when I was using the right stick to move a pointer around and look for clues. All other times, I really hated the controls for fight scenes and dialogue. I also wasn’t thrilled with how several times, I felt like I was forced down a certain path, only to have other characters yell “How could you, Bigby?”

One thing that really burned me up happened two times, where I was told to rapidly tap the X button to fight back in certain cut scenes. Only, when I got to the point of completing the little green circle around the prompt, it just erased itself and I had to start all over. Then I was rescued in both cases by other characters. I felt like that was complete bullshit. If they wanted someone else to save Bigby, then just make it a cut scene and don’t wreck my thumb mashing a button for no damned reason.

The graphics are…adequate. The heavily lined and simply shaded models remind me a bit of Borderlands, but being honest, Borderlands characters and locations have better detail. The comic book the game is based off of has better detail. I feel like the game artists did just enough to give you the gist of the scenes, but stopped short of doing anything to make the characters or the world stand out.

The music is good, and was fitting for all scenes, so no complaints there.

But getting back to the characters, everyone is an asshole. I don’t need everyone to be likable to get into a story, and like I said, both hubby and I got sucked into the mystery even though we disliked the cast. But, there’s no one in this cast that I’d care much about. Even when I was trying to play Bigby to be less of a dick, my seemingly innocent selections would blossom back out into something that would make me cringe. And setting him aside, everyone else in the game is a dick too. Half the cast is like “Yeah, okay, I committed a few dozen crimes, but so what? Life is hard, and you gotta get off my fucking back, sheriff!” And the other half are just as bad with their whining, even if they aren’t quite as scummy.

This does not really encourage me to pick up anything else from TellTale Games. I don’t like their controls, and the story wasn’t so compelling that I’d want to go back through to see what other story options I might unlock with the alternative paths. Like I said, I have very mixed feelings about this. Summing it up, I’d call this an oddly compelling bag of dicks.

But I’ll give The Wolf Among Us 3 stars. It’s not awful, even though the QTEs frequently tested my patience, and it was at least good for five nights of distraction. I would just be hard pressed to recommend it to anyone as anything other than a distraction.