3/5 ★ – ratdom's review of Dragon Age II.

This game was mediocre in almost every aspect. SPOILERS AHEAD: I will say that the armor (that the player character can wear) is a DRASTIC improvement from the stuff you’re given in Origins. The art direction is great; I love all the loading screens and the style of all the interludes where Varric is telling the story. Many of the characters are really good; I love Fenris, even though there’s some things I personally would’ve done differently about his character development. The final quest of the game (The Last Straw) was great; i felt invested in what was happening, and the final boss battle (I sided with the mages) was super cool. It’s great to see a more intricately crafted story revolving around the mages and the Templars. I wanted to see more of that in Origins, I’m glad we got to see a lot of it here. That being said, the game feels hollow. It all takes place in one city, and while that saves time by keeping from having to make tons and tons of environments so that you can redistribute budget and effort elsewhere, I’m not quite sure where that aforementioned budget and effort went. The game has no plot at all. Things just Happen, and they are almost completely disconnected from each other. Unlike in Origins, where you have an end goal set before you and are working your way to get to it and can see it getting closer and closer, DA2 is presented in an episodic, 3-act structure, where you dick around Kirkwall and the surrounding (boring) landscape for about 10 hours of play time, during which you’re doing crime and getting up to Bisexual fun, and then something important happens and the act ends. Each act is separated by 3 years, which isn’t awful, but makes the game feel slightly disjointed. The graphics are an insanely huge step down from DA:O. The armor often has no texture and is simply a flat JPEG slapped onto a model. Peoples faces are incredibly similar, so they often blend together in my memory. They reused some hair from DA:O, and the original hair (eg. Aveline) looks like macaroni and cheese flavored jello. I hate hate HATE that you can’t change your followers’ armor, having to resort to trying to find armor upgrades at very particular places during very particular story beats is a nightmare. So many pieces of armor went to waste, either being thrown away or sold. The amount of reused environments when it came to houses, caves, docks, and warehouses became incredibly irritating. It got to the point where every time I entered a cave I was thinking “ok which side of The Cave Map am I going to be entering from this time.” DA2 Anders is such a downgrade from DAO anders. I understand that he’s got some differences in his character, but I didn’t enjoy the VAs performance, which sucks bc the original Anders VA was voicing a Templar right down the street. I also wish I could’ve seen more of Justice? Had a conversation with him maybe? I’m amazed that they were able to stretch this game out to ~40 hours of gameplay. If the game was maybe 10 hours long it would’ve been way more enjoyable, but it dragged on for far too long, especially in the second half until right before the moment where anders does what he does. Storytelling-wise, it’s a weird choice to come right out of the gate telling your players that a large portion of what they’re about to play may or may not (and probably didn’t) happen, especially given that it’s told through an unreliable narrator. Possibly the worst part of this game is that you can’t talk to your companions but maybe one or two times per act. One of my favorite parts of Origins was how fleshed out the characters were, and how you slowly get to know them through dialogue as the game progresses. It really felt like they were people, and the character development suffered in this game bc that aspect wasn’t present at all. TLDR; some things are really good in this game, but mostly it’s either mediocre or bad. It just made me wanna replay origins.