A rambling return to Dragon Age: Origins

I did a review for Dragon Age: Origins, but didn’t actually finish it. I hated the Loghain storyline, and didn’t feel like going after the big Archdemon at the end because having to fight Loghain, even though he should have been arrested, made my eye twitch. But I watched hubby play through the game to the end, and I decided, What the hell, why not start a new campaign and try again?

(By the way, this has major spoilers if you prefer to avoid that. Just FYI.)

The second time through I played a Dalish Elf rogue, Pokish McStabbers, and I skipped a crap-ton of side quests to just hit the high points and pick up Shale. I let most of the possible companions go, or killed them, as in Zevran’s case. (Hey, you try to kill me, I don’t want you in my camp.) I was totally setting myself up for the most challenging fight eva, EVAH.

Well I got to Loghain again, right? And I’m fully ten levels under what my first character had because of all the side quest skipping. But this time, I chose a different path through the conversation, resulting in all but one arl on my side. Aaaaand, Loghain still gets to call a duel instead of being arrested. Yeah, my eye twitched a lot.

So he does rally as his first move and Pokish chooses to…SUMMON BEAR. She got to cast it before he charged her, so he met a nice furry tank to divert some of his anger on. The fight after that was pretty short. But just as I’m calling for death of the dick regent, at long, long, last, Riordan steps in and says that Roghain could do the binding ritual and become a Grey Warden. Anora points out that there’s a one in three chance it would kill him painfully. And I’m thinking, Russian roulette? Sure, I can work with that.

BUT NO. Alistair gets all pissy and demands hot sticky death for Loghain, and Anora loses her shit and orders Alistair’s execution. I got everything settled down, but Alistair chose to be a whiny prick and leave. So I load back up the previous save, and go through the fight again. Loghain didn’t do rally on the second fight, just charged me. So he got two free shots while I was still summoning the bear. Then I beat the shit out of him again, and when Riordan steps up, I went, “Nuh-Uh! You shut up and back up, bub, because I’m not putting up with Alistair’s whiny ass for this whole game and not get him to the throne for the king you stupid humans so rightly deserve!”

Or it was more like “No, Loghain must die” in the game dialogue options, but I embellish in my in-home role play of some games.

We get to the castle for the night before the big battle, and Pokish talks Alistair into having sex with Morrigan for a ritual to save all the Grey Wardens, no matter who cuts down the archdemon. It’s a “nice” dramatic point, BUT there’s a flaw in this. Back at level ten, I whacked Morrigan’s mother, Flemmeth, as a favor for her. Flemeth, you see, is a demon residing in a woman’s body. And yet, when Alistair killed Flemmeth, he didn’t drop dead in the way Riordan described at the end of the game. So for me, that whole “One of us must die,” and Morrigan’s offer for hawt sex with Alistair, is really kind of thin writing. But eh, not a deal killer like the Loghain thingie was.

Anywho, in all this time, I’ve got companions back at the camp who I gave gifts to make them love me no matter what. Did I just kill your uncle? Here, let me gift that away. But, they also level up even if they’re back at camp, so before the big battle starts, I got to bump up all my personal army with more hit points and spells or feats.

Nevertheless, All my characters are in the level of 17 to 18, and I got pretty nervous. I decided to make my main party Pokish, Alistair, Morrigan, and Wynn, and my backup crew was down to Leilana, Shale, Oghren, and Barkykins, my faithful war hound.

I had a fantastic time smashing the army at the gates, what with all my guys just running around killing everything in sight with one hit kills. I rarely had to fight with anything, and it was all over so fast. Then the two teams divided, and we went in to find the Archdemon general inside Denerim, and these fights were…interesting. A lot of the army is cannon fodder and falls with relative ease. But those generals. Damn, they have a shit ton of hit points.

After hitting the two general, the game suddenly cuts away for a battle with the B line cast defending the get. I’d appointed Leilana as the leader, and it was only after I started the fight that I thought, Oh shit, both my healers are in the other party.

Turns out I didn’t need to worry. All those point boost in dexterity and strength along with bow mastery meant Leilana was doing a great Legolas impersonation, plucking arrows with insane speeds and dropping a great many Hurlocks and Genlocks before they get get through the gate, much less meet the soldiers between the darkspawn and my crew. And when the bigger stuff got through, Leilana summoned a wolf, and it and Shale pounded on whatever broke the rear while Oghren charged up to the gate to serve as a welcoming party. We only lost two of the soldiers, and the fight went by really, really fast.

I kept checking the levels because in the first game, I was higher level, but struggling to survive in every battle. But this time around, even being reduced in level, I was seemingly unstoppable.

The action at the gates done, the game returned to Pokish and her crew, and the next rooms were funny little puzzles. They were FULL of one-hit armies, enough that a swarm of them might be overwhelming. So the trick was positioning Morrigan just close enough to cast Inferno with Wynn healing her from a dozen arrow shots during her casting time. Getting that bad boy cast can clear a hallway quick. Other sections of Drakon Tower called for Pokish to do scout work, but it wasn’t until the end that I needed a different tactic. A Hurlock Alpha spotted us and did a rally call to summon two ogres. I pulled the party back out of range, and they didn’t pursue, so I had time to…SUMMON BEAR. I had Pokish go in under cover of stealth and hit one of the ogres,drawing them out of the room and into a kill box. Morrigan and Wynn both have paralyzing spells, but Morrigan’s failed while Wynn’s didn’t. This still gave the party the chance to waylay one ogre and kill it before the other could free itself. Then we surrounded the second and made hamburger out of it too.

I then sent Smokey in far enough to catch the Hulrock’s attention, in effect, making him the tank while Wyyn and Morrigan both ran into firing positions. Wynn cast Tempest, a storm of lightning damage, and Morrigan went with Inferno. Poor sucker roasted in a little under three seconds.

And at last, we made it to the roof to fight the ARCHDEMON! DUN-DUN-DUN!

Remember, I watched hubby play, and hubby spent a LONG, LONG time trying to get in close with his fighters, and he didn’t do much to manage his mages. Well I figure, “Fuck that, I’m taking two mages to the front line, and both my other party members have bows and mad archery skills. Let’s just sit back and missile this motherfucker before Pokish strolls in for the killing blow.”

And that’s exactly what happened too. When the fight started, I had the option of summoning one of five armies, so I picked the 50 humans. They kept the Archedemon occupied so long as the daft soldiers didn’t crowd around us, and then we’d get briefly mauled. It didn’t help that an army of one-hit darkspawn reinforcements arrived with a few slightly tougher friends. This forced Pokish to…SUMMON–oh hey, didn’t I pick up the skill for summoning a giant spider? Why, yes! Yes, I did! SUMMON SPIDER. Is what I was going to say. I know, you were expecting bear. So was I until that moment.

Pokish, the newly born spider Webikins, and Alistair went to work on the army, leaving Wynn and Morrigan free to keep pummeling missile or elemental attacks from a safe distance, and the soldiers acted smashingly in the operation human shield operation, a cunningly cunning plan devised by the department of redundancy department. By the time that we’d cleared the enemy horde, the Archdemon was down to a sliver of health, so I moved Pokish into place and…said, “Wait, that’s bigger than a sliver. I want this thing barely breathing.”

Alistar and the mages dropped a few more nasty surprises on the Archdemon, and when Pokish made her first swing, that was the last blow.

And how do I feel after killing the Archedemon/dragon? Um…underwhelmed. On the one hand the one-hit crunchies DID give me a kind of sense of progression from my humble roots as a nobody to being death incarnate to darkspawn, and their sheer numbers falling to my four party members regardless of which crew I worked with was pretty epic looking. But for all that build-up, this Archdemon is just a dragon with a lot of friends, most of them little crunchies that didn’t even slow down my plans. An army that big should have gotten something more than a ho-hum reaction out of me. But it really was just another day at the office.

Maybe part of my success had to do with almost all of the party having long range options to hit enemies from far away, or that two of them also had melee options . Or maybe it was being able to conjure animals as an extra party member. And then again, maybe I’ve just played long enough that juggling all five party members (with the companion animals) isn’t as big a deal this time around.

So, I beat the game, and I have to say, I’m giving it four stars, even with the parts I hate. Setting aside Loghain and the Archdemon’s surprising wimpyness, on both plays, I’ve found myself enjoying the combat and my ability to take different paths through a conversation, thus getting a new story out of this run-through. I like that it genuinely feels like role-play, where there’s enough dialogue options that I can find something I think Pokish would say in character. The graphics and character designs get a tad rough in close-ups, and I kinda hate how my character never actually speaks her lines, and only talks in battle. But I do admit, the game thoroughly scratches the same itch I got from playing paper and dice games with my friends in my late teens. I’ve played through two campaigns, racking up 146 hours of game time, and I intend to start up an elf mage next, just to see what kind of hell I can cause with three mages and Leilana as our sole rogue.

I STILL hate the Loghain bits, and I think it drags my enjoyment of the game down a bit. But any game I’ve sunk this much time into has to be good, and certainly worth the money I paid for it. And I haven’t even hit the DLC stuff yet, so I might have to keep playing this game until sometime next year. Which is about the time that Dragon Age III will be out. Nice.