Dragon Age: Origins

The only videos I could find were of the PC version, so the game obvious doesn't play exactly like that. Plus compared to the PC version, the Xbox360 version looks like shit. If you have a super computer, get the PC version.

I wouldn't have given this game a try if it was made by anybody else but Bioware, creators of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade empire, the buggy yet kickass Mass Effect, and surprising enough Sonic Chronicles (I Know!). This is the type of RPGs that I'm familiar with, and therefore stay away from because quite frankly, I see nothing interesting about middle Earth (which is what I'm now calling this era of time). I don't generally like dwarfs and elves and mages and shit like that, but never criticize a product until you tried it (except Sonic Shuffle for Dreamcast) so I decided to pick up a copy. Well, I'm 14 hours in, and something weird is happening. This game reaffirms that I don't like this setting or it's characters, but I can't stop playing. It really says something about the developers if they can hold your attention while playing something you don't like.



So I'm 14 hours in (not counting how many times I fuckin died!), and I'm only sticking to the main quest because all the side quest don't peak much interest. I'm not sure, but I'm pretty confident that I'm not even halfway done. In short, this game is looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong! It's time to start neglecting your family and job because this a huge time commitment, and I mean a big one. The reason for this is because the quests you're on a fuckin huge! Counting the times I died, I spent 4 hours completing one..ONE FUCKIN QUEST! For those who played the game (at least as a mage), it's the quest where you go back to the Circle of Magi and decide to help. And the funny thing about that is I was still in the middle of another quest when I went there. I thought it would a quick 'go in and kill everything' type of thing lasting no more than - I don't know - 45 minutes. NO! 4 BALL SWEATING HOURS! Then I started back on the quest I was originally was supposed to be doing, and halfway through that quest, I realized it was 5 in the morning. I started at 10 the night before. Yea, this game was not designed for people with a social life. Storylines take forever to play out, and half the time I forgot what I was doing. I was just killing people randomly until dialog finally popped up.



Normally in a game like this, I would pick the warrior class because:
A) They never have the fuckin ninja class, and
B) I'm highly aggressive and like to get to the stabby stabby as soon as possible,
but this time I decided to do things differently and went with the female elf mage with a badass tattoo over her eye. Little did I know that this may not be the game you want to try out new shit because I died a lot. Maybe it's because I learned way too late into the game that 'constitution' increases your health and durability. Yea, I know, dummy smacks for me, but why call it constitution? What the fuck happened to health? Are we to fancy now to use that word? I hope not because I never got the fuckin memo. I started off okay, but after a while, my weak body couldn't stand to fight no matter how strong my magic was. And while we're talking about magic, why do mages need mana? They're fuckin mages! Magic should just be flowing out of their asses. They don't need a blue bar telling them what's their limit. In fact, a good mage would make that bar disappear. I think Fable 2 got it right when they eliminated the mana bar because when you run out, your fuckin useless unless you're carrying refills, and since I'm constantly getting my ass kicked, I normally have none going into boss battles.....joy. Luckily, you can switch between your teammates and play as them, which is what I used to do until I realized my mage was blowing all her mana and virtually became useless because the AI doesn't know how to fuckin refill and neither did I! Geez, the game's quests are long enough; you mean to tell me I have to micromanage my team at the same time to make sure they don't fuck up? Holy crap! This game doesn't let you take it easy, does it?



I really don't like the style of gameplay. Basically, you point and click (in PC terms anyway) at what you want dead, and you and the enemy take turns hitting each other. If you ever played World of Warcraft...that. You press A to attack, and watch as your character goes through the attack motion over and over again while the enemy (or enemies because you will get jumped a lot) does the same thing, occasionally switching up to do a better move. There's no reactions to the hits at all really. Seriously, until one of you dies, you'll keep attacking like nothing's happening to you....it's weird. Every time you hit them, a number pops over their head. Gee, I didn't know we were playing murder bingo. I can't wait to see what they do for Scrabble. In all seriousness, the numbers tell you what hit points you've taken away from the enemy, but it's kinda redundant since the health bar is right over their heads. Actually, I take that back because you need those numbers to show you what attacks are the most effective against certain enemies and which ones..UUUUUUUUGH! I can't take this anymore. Why can't I just kill people normally?

You may have noticed I left the story out, but what do you want me to say? There's like 1000s of these fuckin stories that you can go through, and each is like an hour long at least. I can't keep track of my own life, let alone what's going on in this game. I guess the main thing here is that you're something called a Grey Warden, which is a big deal in this world, and you must rally an army to fight hellspawn and bla bla bla. I'm not even sure if that's even important anymore with all the times I've been sidetracked...BY DOING SHIT IN THE MAIN QUESTS!! So how can I continue to play a game I obviously don't like? I'll say this though; those bastards know how to make a damn good story. That's just the magic of Bioware I guess. Even when shit seems discombobulated, it all comes together in the end. It's that same kind of writing that made Mass Effect so kick ass despite the fact that the game was damn near broken. Dragon Age's story...well, stories always kept me interested and motivated me to keep going to see what would happen next. If the CD was nothing more than cut-scenes (and not..you know...60 bucks obviously) I think I would have been happy with that.

I don't know how to rate this one. I can't call it meh because that rating is for games I'm disinterested in. You know, the kind of games you have in your library that you glanced at a couple of times, but say fuck it and don't play them. This isn't that, but at the same time I can't call it sweet because I don't like the gameplay. So you know what, this game gets no rating. That's right; make your own damn rating for a change.

NOTE: Message to Bioware....NINJAS!....think about it. You know this to be awesome.