#anyway i'm at 55 hours give or take and not done yet haha

[sevenmothz]

Spent Friday to today playing Veilguard and honestly, I've been really enjoying it.

The overall story has me hooked, the lore drops have been fucking nuts (it was Solas/Mythal All Along lmao), the combat is pretty damn fun, and I've been really enjoying all of the companions.

That last one is new for me because there is usually always that one or two characters I cannot fucking stand (Oghren and Anders, for instance). Hell, in Inquisition, I was very ambivalent to a majority of the companions. Didn't love them, didn't hate them (which I'm sure half of that feeling can be blamed on the busted banter that never really got fixed). Cole, Dorian, and Cassandra were the three I tended to enjoy the most within that game.

This go around, I've really enjoyed mixing up my crew because I genuinely want to have each of them around and hear them talk to each other (bless the Maker the banter isn't busted in this game--in fact, I haven't run into any bugs in this playthrough so far [knock on wood]). On top of that, because of how the combat works, you're not forced to even out your party classes, lest your mage team gets fucking wiped out because you came across the wrong tanky enemy, or you get locked out of a room that's blocked off and needs a rogue or warrior to get in.

I think Taash is PROBABLY at the bottom of the list of characters I like most, and most of that is just they're young and kinda brash and stand-offish, and that character type doesn't always jive with me haha. Their Queer Journey(TM) story is kinda whatever (I've seen this story beat about a million times at this point--it's repetitive to me at this point ahaha), but at least it seems to be actually going somewhere and has had build-up. Like, I'm still invested in seeing the story through.

As much as I love Dorian, his personal story pretty much ended before it really began. You get the one quest about his dad doing a conversion therapy on him in the past via blood magic, and that's pretty much the meat of Dorian's story. Gaider really stumbled over that follow-up. What's worse is you can get that quest REALLY early on in the game, so it's long been history by the time you finish Inquisition.

But even with all that said about Taash's story, I still really enjoy bringing 'em along when I'm running all over the place.

As for my favorite companion? It's probably gotta be Emmrich, and that might be the bias talking because I opted to play as a Mourn Watcher and get lots of extra opportunities to nerd it up with him about being a necromancer haha. Being able to see how Nevarrans (minus Cassandra lmao) look at things like death and spirits has been really enjoyable. It's a nice change of pace after years of Andrastian characters with more strict ideals.

I know some people had complaints about how the companions don't really have any big conflicts with each other, but honestly, it feels right for the story that they're not at each other's throats. They're all professionals at what they do like the Inquisition team, but they have far bigger fish to fry and no armies and major connections to make up for their slack like the Inquisition crew did (and honestly, DAI didn't have much in the inter-group conflicts outside of some catty dialogue).

On top of that, they got to live with each other in a much more intimate way than the Inquisition group did. They basically live in a commune where you gotta get along or shit isn't going to get done.

Hawke's group were able to get away with being such godawful assholes to each other because for a majority of the years spent together, they didn't have the fate of the world on their shoulders. They just had their own personal issues to worry about (up until the qunari attacked and Anders did a terrorism).

Anyway, I wound up romancing Lucanis. I wasn't on the hype train for him, but then he went and batted those puppy eyes at Rook and I couldn't help myself lmao. Plus, I found I'd much rather romance Davrin with a dwarf anyway. Something about Wardens and dwarves man...does stuff to my brain.