Dragon Age

If you're wondering why there's been a reprieve in my FF7 posts, it's because I've been playing a lot of Dragon Age recently. I don't have a lot of previous experience with Bioware games. Somehow I even let the entire Knights of the Old Republic craze pass me by. So I can't really tell you if Dragon Age lives up to all of Bioware's previous celebrated fare, but I can tell you that it's a fun, immersive, well-presented action RPG. Something like 24 hours in, I don't really know if I can call it a great game, but it's certainly very good.

Dragon Age has a dark fantasy setting, somewhat reminiscent of Lord of the Rings, the Elder Scrolls games, maybe a bit of Diablo, and probably a lot of people's D&D campaigns. You pick a race (human/elf/dwarf) and class (warrior/mage/rogue, these can be further specialized later), and then you play through one of a handful of different background areas until you reach the point in the plot where you get recruited by the Grey Wardens. In the story Grey Wardens are an ancient sect of warriors which has defended Ferelden--the world in which this is set--from a series of "blights": hordes of demons called darkspawn who pillage their way across the countryside. Alas, though, just as you're inducted into the Grey Wardens, just about all of them who aren't you are slaughtered in a battle against the darkspawn. So now it's up to you, and the handful of allies that you pick up along the way, to convince Ferelden's population of elves, dwarves, and magi to honor old treaties with the Grey Wardens and come fight for you. And oh yeah, a power hungry guy trying to usurp the throne has labeld you a traitor. So there's plenty to keep you occupied. As you'd expect from any well-made RPG of any kind these days, there are also plenty of sidequests and divergent storylines for you to choose from.

The gameplay consists of Action RPG elements similar to those of the Marvel Legends games as well as Final Fantasy XII (others, I'm sure, as well but those are the first two that came to my mind). There's one "main" protagonist, the character whom you customize the looks and abilities of at the start, but you can have up to four characters active in a party at any given time. You can only directly control one character simultaneously but you can switch which character this is at any time with L1 and L2. Additionally, you can also hold L2 to pause combat and bring up an abilities menu from which you can use L1 and L2 again to switch characters and give any character any command. Otherwise, the three characters who you aren't controlling act on their own through a series of Tactics, which can be chosen from a number of presets or customized. Unlike the incredibly agitating Gambit system in Final Fantasy XII, you can use any of the possible conditions for actions immediately (i.e. Self HP < style="font-style: italic;">Dragon Age has all the traditional RPG equipment slots (helmet, armor, rings, belt...) which you can equip with armor you can buy or find in the field. Each piece has different stat requirements for a character to be able to wear it based on whether it's light, medium, or heavy, and based on what tier it is. Speaking of, weapons and armor are separated into tiers--which the game is nice enough to color code in menus--that provide a general idea of their relative strength, but weapons and armor can also have any number of additional bonuses beyond their base attack/armor rating. Higher quality weapons also have slots for runes, that you find or buy separately and can slot into the weapon to further enhance it, kind of like how gems work for armor in World of Warcraft.

In between fightin' stuff and gettin' loot, there's a lot of time spent in towns speaking to the various denizens to advance the story and get more quests. In general, the voice acting is pretty good, and better than most games. In addition to talking to people, you can press X next to certain books, notes, statues, and a whole bunch of other stuff in the environment and get a 'codex' entry that you can read through in the menu. If you really get into the world and want to learn as much as possible about it, there's plenty to keep you busy. Personally, to this point I've found myself just sort of casually flipping through some of it.

That's pretty much all I have for now. I might revisit writing about the game later once I've completed it. Overall it's a lot of fun, although there are a few things about the system that I think could work better than they do.