For an added Christmas gift to myself I decided to buy a highly anticipated game, Dragon Age Origins. I’ve played many classic RPGs in my time and most of them seem very flat, difficult to control and riddled with clichés.
Unfortunately, Dragon Age meets most of the repeated disappointments in RPGs. One, customizing your character is a tedious task because it really doesn’t matter what you look like because it hardly effects the game and all of the choices are plain ugly.
In addition, there was only the plain human, pointy eared human, and short-stocky human to choose from.
I don’t know why realism transforms the game into a muddy brown mess of hardship, but it adds little to the enjoyment of the game and makes me sigh in disappointment at the graphics.
The blood splatter on characters just made me laugh and say ewww. I don’t understand why a Mature rating in a fantasy RPG means dark theme, with cussing and head to toe blood showers.
To further the laugh I thought the Darkspawn looked like Lord of the Rings orcs with a horrible skin condition. Seriously, they couldn't think of anything more original, at least add some thing outside of the generic fantasy spectrum. There are winged-wolves, stayers, giant puffer fish, giant eyes that can shoot lasers, cat people! Anything to at least stand out from the basic Dungeon and Dragons thought up by an eight year old.
The plot also made me question the writing skills of the team because at one point Alistair describes his character as the bringers of bad news and witty one liners. Honestly I liked him compared to Morrigan whose lack of social contact with people made her an annoying-sarcastic-monotone filler.
All the characters were flat, annoying and looked like they smoked pot from the bags under their eyes. I could not connect with any of them effectively to care if they lived or died.
The story itself has many choices, personally, I chose the Mage path and I hated how if you chose the wrong phrase to answer certain questions you would become stuck. No offense to the sandbox, but I rather have a guided game than dig through the sand only to find cat turds.
This plan would especially be useful in quelling tedious quests like Kill the Bears or Find Me a Pretty Pansy were used for filler and not the progression of the story itself.
The battle system was well planned for an RPG, but I hated having to understand how to play every character and develop them. Honestly I just wanted to focus on my own character and let the computer do the work for the other party members.
When I did return the game the employees at the store ragged on me for disliking one of the “best RPGs ever” and dictated to me how I chose the wrong story to play the game with. Excuse me, but shouldn’t any character choice be well rounded and written? All it lead for me to believe was there was just sheer laziness from the development team.
