4/5 ★ – ZombiePanda's review of Dragon Age: Inquisition.

With the recent launch of The Veilguard I decided to finally come back and nab the last 4 trophies I needed to get the coveted platinum. I have a love/hate relationship with this game, and the trophies list supports this. I started the game 10 years ago but fell off rather quickly. I picked the game back up two years later in 2016 and sank 300 hours into it to complete the story and all of the side content, including the DLC. If you asked me a week ago what I thought of DA3, I would have told you it’s the weakest one with lots of boring filler side quests in large but empty areas. I stand by that notion, but I have finally found the positive perspective nugget that I needed in this game. It’s the gameplay, or rather the combat. DA:O was such a strong start with world and character building. Truly a masterpiece with tone and storytelling. BUT the combat was dry, frustrating, and old. Not to mention the “builds” for your character didn’t feel all that harmonious. There were many skill “trees” each with only a handful of abilities. The strength of the game was the choices the player made. And there were plenty of choices to be made, starting with the six different origin prologues. DA2 improved the visuals and the combat in exchange for more of an action RPG vibe rather than classic D&D ripoff. The many skill trees are somewhat narrowed down allowing builds to be more choice oriented, and elemental combo synergize build and party composition. Unfortunately most of the skill trees are filled with action abilities with only a few passives in the bunch. People will always give this game flack for the reused environments, but since the story revolves around a single city I never took issue. DA3 (I prefer giving it a number rather than its subtitle because, let’s face it, it’s a terrible title) Takes all of the best parts of the previous two games and combines them together while also trying some new things too. Character builds feel so much more important now, the choice shifted away from story elements and more towards combat focused composition. Figuring out the proper path in the skill webs to combine abilities and passives that make you into a combat god was equally as satisfying as a having to make difficult choices in the story. I know the next game changes everything up again, and that some people aren’t happy with what we got, but honestly every Dragon Age is flawed in some way or another. If you don’t like slow tactic RPGs you won’t like DA:O. If you don’t like reused character models or areas you won’t like DA2. And if you don’t like games that take 4-10 hours to really get started you won’t like DA3. But I do