Summary [8.5 out of 10]

Breaking away from the Grey Warden storyline from the previous entry, Dragon Age II follows Hawke, a human champion who rises to prominence from the abject poverty of the slums to play a major part in a fairly massive conflict in Kirkwall. Taking away the multiple origins of the first title, Dragon Age II deals with one central character and tells a much more focused story than Origins. In doing so it also removes a host of options available for where the story can go which makes this a much less robust experience than the first title. There is plenty to do here and the story is a good one but it feels a lot more like a side story than a proper sequel. Thankfully, Bioware improved the two biggest deficits from the first game: graphics and combat. While the story and character development is weaker, the combat and graphics pick up the slack and make for a generally fun and engaging RPG.

What It’s Like:

• Dragon Age Origins: Awakenings:  The mechanics are a bit different but the addition of political maneuvering makes this feel like Awakenings. The more focused story also draws parallel to the expansion’s storyline.

• Fallout: New Vegas: Because of the more compact and focused story, Dragon Age II feels much more like an expansion than a true sequel in the same way that New Vegas was more of a side story than a true sequel. Dragon Age II might have done better to throw on a subtitle and give Bioware a couple of years to percolate a more worthy sequel.
• Champions of Norrath: The combat improvements give you more direct control over the combat and it feels a lot more like an action dungeon crawler than a strategic/tactical RPG like the last game.
• Mass Effect 2: The streamlined conversation wheel and the specific companion quests were cribbed directly from Mass Effect 2.

The Great:

• Graphics: The graphics of the previous installments were something you had to tolerate and look past. While some of the designs were interesting the whole thing looked pretty lackluster. For Dragon Age II the graphics have been cleaned up quite a lot and the style has been overhauled significantly. The world has a much more defined visual identity that doesn’t look nearly as ripped off from Lord of the Rings or other such fantasy properties as the first effort did. The animations are smooth and natural and the character models are generally well drawn. The armor looks a lot better this time around and the goofy helms, particularly the mage hats, are gone entirely. Everything looks a lot cooler and a lot less like you need to update the prescription on your glasses.

• Combat: Dragon Age Origins was made for the PC so the port over to consoles was not an easy one. The combat was designed for point and click and got shoe horned into a controller and the result was decidedly mixed. And when I say mixed I mean it was annoying and glitchy. A button press essentially just dialed in a command to happen at an appropriate time like if you were playing WoW or Diablo with a mouse. That would have been fine if the system worked properly but it often resulted in your character standing there doing nothing while you were telling it to do important party saving things. To this end, Bioware has overhauled the combat completely. On the surface it looks very similar but the combat here offers up a 1 to 1 button press to action ratio. This makes the combat much more exciting and you feel like you are actually doing something. This also allows for better maneuvering and executing real time tactics. The option still exists to pause the action to assign commands to your companions but for the most part, at least on normal difficulty, you don’t have to if you don’t want to.

• Moral Ambiguity: Like the previous games, Dragon Age II offers a lot of different choices and few of them are black and white. It is often difficult to decide what position to take to keep your companions happy and to keep a favorable outcome for your character. While this is a bit more black and white than the other games it still makes for some agonizing moral choices and there often isn’t a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ choice.

The Good:

• Story: The story is more focused and less robust than the previous game’s story but it does some interesting things and goes places you might not expect. It is told by one character to another and some events have to be replayed to get closer to the truth which makes for an interesting mechanic. The lack of a central villain until late in the game has the potential to annoy some people but I think it makes for a cool way to look at the life of this character. Given it follows Hawke over the course of many years it would have felt strange to have a persistent villain the entire time. Instead, Hawke deals with situational events that lead to the major conflict as each quest informs the coming events. So if you look at it as the story of Hawke as opposed to the story of a particular event or conflict then the format makes sense and is successful. That being said, I still prefer the way the story was told in Origins.

• Replay: While again this game is more focused than the previous game, Dragon Age II is still very large and offers branching paths and multiple endings. All of this makes for a healthy amount of replay if not nearly as much as the first game offered.

• Characters/Relationships: The characters and the resulting relationship management that stems from them are again a strong suit. Through companion quests and special dialogue during the game you can curb their favor or draw their ire. The characters offered here are pretty interesting and are all well fleshed out. I would hard pressed to choose my favorite roster across the games but this one is pretty good. Cameos and returning characters make things more fun too and the interactions here are worth the time you put in to cultivate them.

• Continuity: It is good to be able to import your save information from Origins and Awakenings and while you aren’t going to see as many repercussions as in Mass Effect, it is still pretty cool to feel like what you do from game to game matters in the world. That the events from the previous games effect who you interact with in this one makes it even better.

• Lack of glitches: As much as I loved Origins it was riddled with glitches. From your character floating in the air, to getting stuck in a corner, to game freezes and inputs being ignored the thing makes you wonder what glitches they caught before sending it out. Here I didn’t encounter any. Given that the past few Bioware reviews I’ve written have all included GLITCHES in the bad column I think it is pretty significant that this one ran so smoothly.

The Bad:

• Too delineated: The story has a persistent undercurrent running through of conflict between apostate (rogue) mages and the templars (the regulatory agency that governs mages) and as such there is a dividing line between characters. They are pretty much either for mages or against mages. This makes for some interesting and intriguing story moments but it makes it a bit difficult to run a well balanced party since to keep everyone happy you can’t mix and match so much. Unfortunately, if you aren’t a warrior, you are going to have to do the best you can in order to have one in your party as the two available are anti-mage. The rogues are a bit better about this but it makes it pretty difficult to manage relationships effectively. Sure that is part of the challenge but a bit more gray would have been appreciated.

• Less options: A lot of things were streamlined here and that generally took a lot of choices away from the player. You no longer manage your party members armor, providing them instead with purchased upgrades and this makes loot collecting feel much more hollow. Further, the single origin takes away a lot of story options and choices by virtue of it being more character specific. I miss having a lot options depending on what sort of character I have chosen. This goes for the character creator as well. What is here is good but I would like more.

• Difficulty: There are several difficulty options but they need to be balanced much better. Like Awakenings, the normal difficulty is very, very easy. The harder difficulties ramp up significantly so even if you practice on normal you aren’t really especially prepared for what is to come. Ratcheting the normal difficulty up a bit and bringing easy up to normal would be a more realistic ladder to climb to the higher difficulties.

Conclusion [8.5 out of 10]

I loved Origins to a degree that might have landed me in a mental hospital in the past so I approached Dragon Age II with all of that love. It is hard not to be disappointed with a lot of the things that made that game robust and unique have been streamlined or changed completely. At the same time, this installment delivers satisfying graphics and action so playing is still fun and engaging. I hope in the future I won’t have to sacrifice one for the other but as it is the things that made me love Dragon Age Origins are nerfed for Dragon Age II and the things I loved about Dragon Age II are the things that I didn’t care for in Origins. Now Bioware just needs to marry these two together and give us a complete experience.