Dragon Age: Origins : PS3
Sitting down to write this review of Dragon Age: Origins, my mind is in turmoil over where to start or what to say because there are so many conflicting thoughts I have about this game. I literally just finished it and am sitting here utterly disappointed, and yet reminding myself that I just spent fifty hours enjoying myself with the game. So is it good or not?
I’ll start at the beginning. DAO is a ‘western RPG’ to differentiate between that and a JRPG like Final Fantasy. I’ve played the odd western RPG but not as many as I have JRPGs because ultimately I’ve found them to be a little lacking. It seemed as though my entire friend network loved DAO (or at least, they were playing it a lot) so surely I’d like it too. I was excited to play it, didn’t really know what it was going to be like except it needed a lot of hours put into it and so I sat down almost a month ago now, with a strange juxtaposition of openmindedness and heavy expectation.
Given the time of DAO’s release, my JRPG comparison is Final Fantasy XIII, and within a few hours of play (ten or so), I had a pretty good idea about the differences between the two and it was an interesting to see; you see, everything that is wrong with Final Fantasy XIII is done right here, but to make it fair, everything that is wrong about DAO is done right in FFXIII - someone needs to merge these games.
For a start, DAO looks pretty rubbish, if I’m honest. It’s too grimy, the character models have stupid things like bits of armour moving through shoulders, there’s not enough colour and even the prettiest of girly characters (Leliana, I’m looking at you) couldn’t hold a candle to the averagest of average Final Fantasy girl. There are some cool effects, like the persistent gore, but generally speaking, Dragon Age has nothing to bring to the graphics department. The sound is functional, but nothing amazing, though some of the voice acting is lovely and every now and then you recognise the actor involved, and the interface is utterly basic and annoying with a good deal of time spent navigating menus or wishing that they’d made better use of the shoulder buttons to allow more access to a greater variety of spells. So in the whole ‘user experience’ section, Dragon Age falls far behind its Japanese cousin.
Where DAO does start to pick up on points is immediately evident in the conversations and role play choices you are offered. This game really feels as if the choices you make have a tangible difference on the storyline (probably because they do!). Often you are sat there thinking ‘ooh, what do I want to say now?’ and getting people to like you and react accordingly is a lot of fun. The little background chatting between your party members is great to listen to as you walk around too. This leads me (earlier than I intended) into the whole party interaction thing and ultimately to the fact that you can entice some of the party members into romantic relations. I loved this for the first 95% of my game; I loved picking things to say to people to affect how they felt about me, finding the right gifts for them and ultimately in one case, trying to get the girl (yes, Leliana, I’m looking at you again) but to find that by the end it didn’t react in a realistic fashion but what was literally a choice of picking exactly the right thing to say during exactly the right conversation and with no chance of doing it if you have passed a certain point has left me very cold indeed. In short, it isn’t actually a clever system weighing up all your actions, but a simpler and less satisfying ‘say this, then this, then this during this conversation’ trigger. This shattered the wonderful illusion that I was impacting this world, and ripped it right back to ‘just a computer game’. A bitter disappointment. Still, for the most part, that illusion does work and for this reason Dragon Age feels a lot more like you make an impact than Final Fantasy XIII and the western game is winning here.
Continuing the comparison, we move on to the gameplay itself. I’ll say it straight out - Dragon Age’s combat system is pretty crap. I chose to be a mage (surprise!) and to make it interesting, decided to be a support mage with all the debuff type spells and not so much direct damage; it’s certainly a possible game type. Maybe then, the problem was mine, but combat came down to a simple equation: ‘Does the monster resist a paralysis spell?’. If it doesn’t, then you win, no contest. If it does, well then hope the NPC party members bash it fast or you have to go back to the last save point. To be honest though, nothing really does resist except the odd boss and those all have alternative ways of killing them which are storyline specific. This means the combat is boring and repetitive, with no real need for tactics as you wade through everything and yet you die a lot when the game reacts in the only real way it can, which is to overwhelm you with surprise badguys which means you die on the first run and then mash it happily the second time around when you know it is coming. Perhaps this would be different if I’d played a different character type, but knowing that even the toughest of bad guys were just fodder to a paralysis spell followed by simple bashing until they fall meant it was never scary. It also had the knock on effect that in the final battle I had practically nothing to do as every single spell I had was resisted by the big bad boss guy and so I might as well have been a level one villager for all the impact I made on the fight, meaning that fight was disappointing and dull too. Final Fantasy XIII definitely wins here; those fights are cool.
Then you have the quests themselves and the storyline that encapsulates it all. It’s all very boringly standard fantasy fare; dwarves, elves, mages etc. Yawn, yawn, yadda, yadda. I spent so much of the storyline wishing that they’d make it somewhat original, but no. In fact, if Frodo had run in front of me shouting something about a ring, I’d not have blinked in surprise, but taken it as part of the normal run of things. The quests themselves were very clever sometimes, with nested questing occurring often and sometimes pulling you off on a tangent before returning to the meat of things, but the problem was that each of the larger quests were enormous, like five to ten hours enormous. That’s a lot of time to spend in the same area bashing through similar monsters without much in the way of anything, especially as every twenty or thirty monsters you have to run back to the nearest shop to drop off all the junk, and there’s a hell of a lot of junk equipment in this game. Sometimes though, I really appreciated the enormous quests, I think it depended on my mood. Dragon Age definitely loses against the Japanese games when it comes to plot then, though at least the bad guy didn’t have six forms to kill…
This review might make you think I didn’t enjoy the game, and on paper it does look like that, but the thing was that during my actual game sessions, I was loving Dragon Age Origins, right up until the end, and I know what it was - I expected something to come from it all; I was waiting hours upon hours for some great revelation or moment - for the big reveal, and the problem with it all was that when the credits rolled, there was no big reveal. There was nothing; just fifty hours of play ending in… nothing. It’s a great fun experience which flops in the final moments so heavily that it leaves you feeling bitter and angry. Well, it did for me, anyway.
There’s the DLC which I’m tempted by (mainly because I can get it all on disc for a relatively small sum), and the second game may well fix some of these problems (or just introduce more) but ultimately I my feeling on Dragon Age Origins is one of disappointment that it didn’t go anywhere.
Maybe one day there’ll be a game which looks and sounds like a Final Fantasy game with the world-affecting feeling and breadth of Dragon Age which has a good ending and player satisfaction. That day, RPGs, whether eastern or western, will be very good indeed.
