A Whole Lot of Silence and Trousers - You Can't Spell the Fade without EFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF (2)!

DRAGON AGE ORIGINS [DAO] STORY - CIRCLE OF MAGI, THE FADE

Content - Gaslighting, Nonconsensual Drugging, Demonic Possession.

A game that's going to have a hefty run time has got to change things up every once in a while, or run the risk of things getting stale.  I am ok with this.  A lot of the time, I appreciate this. DAO tries this a lot, and I am want to get behind it, but the problem with it is that it tries it all in the Sloth/Fade sequence, and the result is a couple of nasty spikes in difficulty and a deep well of confusion, and nothing that persists beyond this one sequence.  Seriously, you can (and indeed must) learn four alternate forms in the Fade in order to progress to the end of the sequence, but if you go and confront the titty demon that possesses the Arl's son in the Fade, even if it is literally the next thing you do after leaving the Circle (and it was), you can't use them.  There is a whole part of the interface (which is dogshit, by the by) which handles those four forms and telling your party to hold position or move again.

Anyway, let's go over the things they introduce in Sloth's neighborhood of the Fade which never show up again.

Metroidvania - This one requires a bit of explanation.  Metroidvania, coming from the Metroid and Castlevania series (though missing from about half the latter's early games), is a way to describe games with a not-strictly-linear progression, whereby you see places you cannot access in the earlier parts of the game and gain means to access them as you progress.  In Sloth!Fade, there are areas which you can only access through mouse holes, giant blocked doors, incorporeal portals and on the far side of instakill fire, and in order to access these, you need to get the means to do so in other parts of the area.

Alternate Form - After a short time on Niall's part of Sloth!Fade, you get the ability to take on the form of a mouse, kind of like that Pride Demon in the mage intro-sequence.  A little alarming, but the mouse appears to... fade out... of the Fade (AUGH) instead of turning into the spikiest sex toy ever.*  Which allows you to travel through mouse holes.  There is also a golem, an undead guy on fire and an arcane horror form, each of which allows you to traverse certain obstacles.  While in these forms, you have certain different capabilities and vulnerabilities.  As a mouse, you can stealth, but you can't do anything else.  As a burning guy, you can throw fireballs (though any time you're the burning guy, it's because you have to traverse instakill flames, and everyone else is just as immune to fire as you are, so nuts to that).  As the golem you can throw rocks and stomp a lot, making people fall down.  As the arcane horror, you can cast a couple of different spells, which aren't as useful as the fireball and flamethrower would be if you could use that form somwhere you didn't need to use the burning guy.  These forms give you a little taste of crappier versions of the classes you could have chosen, and also set the Sloth!Fade up for serious dickish artificial difficulty potential.  Changing forms requires you digging through the dogshit interface to find the command and a few moments where you are not getting your ass kicked, something that can be hard to find.

Instakill Flames - Fire is not something you generally want to cuddle, I get that.  However, in the rest of the game, fire must sometimes be interacted with.  It is not pleasant.  It causes damage and makes your character scream like... well, like they are on fire.  Except in Sloth!Fade.  In Sloth!Fade, you touch fire, you die.  You touch kinda close to fire, you die.  These flames look no different than any flames you get thrown or blasted into your face elsewhere in the game.  These ones just kill you the instant you brush by them.

Artificial Difficulty - This one is a trickier and, I guess a more contraversial topic than the others.  Instakill flames are part of it, but those annoyed me enough to prompt a separate entry.  Artifical difficulty is what happens when a game decides to act like a 7th grade Dungeon Master, making a situation far more difficult than it ever has been or would have been by the placement of things.  For example, you must be in mouse form to pass through the mouse holes.  In mouse form, your only defense is stealth.  Stealth does not work on wolves, and so guess what is on the other side of many, many mouse-holes.  That or a tiny room with two already-rampaging golems.  They can't see you, sure, but they can't not hit the entire room and all it's contents anyway.  Or when you are the burning guy, you get into a room which is blocked off on both sides with instakill flames and has a couple of bonfires in it, then spawns in fire-immune creatures who you cannot damage in that form, but can damage you.  Or putting mages on the far side of golem doors, since you're vulnerable to magic in golem form.  Or golems on the far side of spirit doors, since you're vulnerable to rock in spirit form.

Door Puzzles - Go out door A, in Door B.  Go out Door B, in Door M.  Find the correct sequence, using that shitty map and your shitty memory to proceed.  Then get jumped by the SEVEN MAGE DEATH SQUAD.

And you're all by your lonesome - which meant that Harriet and her noodly mage arms were spending a lot of time in melee combat with 3 and 4 immolated darkspawn (and much of her bread and butter damage spells being - you guessed it - fire based).

None of these, not even the artificial difficulty, bother me in and of themselves.  Even together, they aren't bad.  Hell, you make an entire game out of this sequence, throw on a very unforgiving control scheme, take away the map completely, and have other players periodically beam into my game and murder me, and I will call it Dark Souls and eat it up like fried dough at a carnival to which I arrived three sheets to the wind.**  But if you slip them in 10 hours into a game in which they did not previously exist, I am going to... apparently, cry about it on livejournal.***

Well, anyway, you fight your way through all these, and you get a chance to rescue your friends from their dreams.  In Sooney's and Harriet's runs, I brought a grand total of Wynne, Shale, Sten and Alistair into the Fade with me, so I will tell you their dreams.

Alistair has to take a math test at templar school, only he hasn't studied and suddenly, he realizes he's nake... Not really, he's visiting his half-sister for the first time in Denerim and she's really nice.  Well, until she turns into a demon.  Given the choice, I will take Fade!Sister over Real!Sister.

Shale is stuck again, like she was in Honnleath.  Eventually, Sooney talked her out of it (Harriet did not take her) and some demons attack.

Wynne is mourning the mages she couldn't protect.  She gives you a lot of shit for suggesting this isn't real, but then the demons have to go and spoil it by making the bodies rise and tell Wynne to stay with them.  Twins, play with us forever, elevators full of blood, bigwheels, room 237, you were always the caretak- wait.  No, it's just another fight against lava poops.

Sten has the most interesting dream of the lot, as it lets you see other Qunari; in this case a pair of dead subordinates who sass him and sass each other and are just full of sass (but do not have horns, interestingly).  This one was the most interesting because it let you see Sten interact with his own people and be less of a grumpopotomus.  But he knows it's a dream, because Qunari game is better than your game, and cue the demons.

At this point, Harriet gets one more boss battle against Sloth, a demon so lazy he doesn't have his own body, and Niall gives her a spell that should help against the blood mages (I have no idea if it did), but he can't come back because he's been in the Fade too long and his body's dead.  And back to the tower.

At this point, there is only Cullen, stuck in a force field, having gotten his mind worked over by blood mages.  He's a trifle upset, as one can imagine, confessing his crush on Harriet with one breath and calling for mage-o-cide with the next.  This is a point at which you can get Wynne killed pretty easily.  If you sympathize with Cullen too much, he convinces the Knight Commander to purge the Circle anyway, and you have to help, I think.  Darkpaisley's first run through the tower ended this way, and she warned me off it, so I've never done it.  I think it happens after you fight Uldred, though.

Uldred is another boss battle, tiddly-pom.  I think that using the spell Niall gives you affects how many hunchback/mushroom/candle people show up, but I'm not sure.  I get the impression that it didn't work when I tried to use it.  Perhaps you have to use it multiple times in a fight.  I just know Sooney and Harriet used it once a piece, and there were a lot more mages left over from Sooney's fight.

Shady Dumbledore survives the fight, though, so when you all show up at the door, he and the Knight Commander make out, and promise all the mages you need when you need them.  Not really, but it would be awesome if they did.

* It's the purple.  And the sparklies.

** I imagine I would also be lurching around trying to find one of those bacon-wrapped roast turkey legs from Parks & Rec.

*** A MAN LOOKS AT HIS LIFE A MAN LOOKS AT HIS CHOICES.