#da2 was my favourite for a long time but then i learned zur is a zionist so now when i hear his war drums gonging i wanna bash his head so

[stardust-on-the-boots]

I really hate to break it to you, but origins wasn't at all the first fantasy story was "spun around" and the opposite of "classic" tolkienesque high fantasy genre, where elves or mages were opressed, where "orcs" are intelligent etc. It all happened in fantasy long before, be it tabletops, books, comics or videogames (even other bioware games, too). Dragon age 2, however, was a very original fantasy story, it was very flawed, but also very challenging for us players. It really is sad that because of the amount of flaws it had, the game was pretty much a flop and writers didn't want to risk writing something similarly theirs anymore.

DAI was dull because they took a safe road, the villain wasn't fleshed out (god I hated what they did to one of my favourite characters of the franchise), we beat him pretty much evrytime we meet him; the ethical conflict surrounding mage rights (that was so fun and interesting to explore) and the war that was taking place are never truly explored in the game, it just ends, huh; where in DAO all companions (well, except maybe Sten and Shale, but they both are so well written and don't hold the same function as other characters, they're here for you to explore the world even more) were chess pieces in the grand scheme of things and therefore were fleshed out through motivation, and in DA2 the companions were always Hawke's equals, had their own lives, made decisions regardless of what the protagonist wants or stands for, in DAI, lots of them are just..there. Or not explored enough. Vivienne could be so much more. Dorian could be so much more (!). Sera could be so much more. Cole could be so much more. They all could make you experience the world and understand it's politics and social tendencies better. They could be there to make you disagree with them. Instead they're just sort of silent witnesses to whatever you're up to. Yeah, the approval system was there, but it never actually changed anything. It was also really easy to fix anything through dialogs. The main storyline is weak. There are elements of things that could be so engaging. Show me families seeing their dead sons and daughters coming back from the exalted plains. Show me a soldier having to kill his best friend twice. Show me what the elves living there made of all this, show me how they put it all together in their worldview, show me them being compassionate or repulsed by this war. Show me them exploring the ruins. Show me one of your party members slowly losing it because of all that red lyrium in Emprise du Lion. Make my inquisitor hear some echo of the Song. Show me what working in this mines truly was like. Put literally anything in the hissing wastes. Don't make the second half of the game exclusively a "let's learn some elven lore" adventure. Put in some goddamn deep roads! (Really I don't get why people hate them so much, it's like the best part of DAO).

I think ultimately, there was a huge tonal shift in DAI. DAO and DA2 explored things like addiction, mind control, self-actualisation, uncontrolled science, radicalisation, sexual violence, racism, sexism, cultural appropriation, forms of control, mental illness, colonialism and slavery, genocide, religion and fanaticism, all this and more sprinkled with political and economical discourse. And there was still time to add in themes of love, friendship, compassion, kindness and forgiveness. In DAI, everything is so much brighter (literally and figuratively). Everything is in the background, while the hero beats the bad guy triumphantly. Did you feel triumphant when you killed Orsino and Meredith?

I wouldn't say it's all bad or boring. There are pretty cool new things that I'd like to see in dragon age more. But it feels very different from other games of the franchise. To me, it was extremely noticeable through first hours through music. Remember Inon Zur's soundtracks? You would recognise dragon age right away. It had a distinct character and sound. DAI sounds pretty, beautiful sometimes, but so...generic. Nothing like dragon age.

So I’ve probably said this before, but I’ll say it again.

The reason Dragon Age Inquisition feels so much like a misfire is because it missed a lot of the point of the previous games in the series. Where Inquisition was a story about a Chosen One figure being the only one who can fight and stop this threat, the kind of story we’ve seen repeatedly and constantly in the fantasy genre, Dragon Age Origins and especially Dragon Age 2 were designed to deconstruct the familiar tropes of the genre.

I mean, Dragon Age 2 is pretty much explicit in that fact. The point and purpose of the ‘Varric as narrator’ device is that Cassandra has heard the tale of the Champion of Kirkwall and now wants to know the truth, wants to know about the person behind that myth. What she ends up getting is a tale of an ordinary person dragged into situations beyond their control and, by virtue of a little luck and some faithful companions, ends up being the one still standing at the end of it. Hawke is no Chosen One. S/he’s just a person who was in the wrong place at the right time and got to be remembered as a hero.

And even the Warden has this trait - the Warden, by virtue of the origins mechanic, could not be ‘the Chosen One’ either. We get plenty of information on the other origins that indicate that, regardless of whether we chose to play as that character, those origins still occurred. Howe still invades Highever and kills much of the Cousland family. Endrin’s middle child is blamed for the death of his eldest and sentenced to the Deep Roads. Brosca entered the Provings and ends up dying in Jarvia’s prison cells. All the origins happen, it’s just your decision tells Duncan where to go to recruit.

Origins itself was meant to deconstruct a lot of the standard tropes in fantasy. Here, the elves were beaten and down-trodden, long past the days of their ancient, glorious empire, where any arrogance on their part was purely meant as the only way they really can fight back with humanity - ‘we may have little, but we will take pride in that little.’ Mages are not the wise and respected advisors to some noble, but instead are locked up and shackled in a tower because the abilities they have are dangerous and deadly if they’re allowed to run free. The dwarves, often considered ‘as constant as the stone’ are a stagnant and dying culture, and the one dwarf we ever really meet who embodies the stereotypes is Oghren, who is a pariah among his fellow dwarves. Hell, in many ways, the qunari are orc-analogs, and instead of being the simple bruisers whose first instinct is to crush and smash and destroy, they’re highly intelligent, to the point that they have technology far beyond what the humans have.

Dragon Age started as a deconstruction and even examination of old fantasy tropes. On a personal note, that’s what made the series so interesting to me - instead of just taking a Tolkien-style world at face value, Dragon Age took those tropes and turned them on their head. In some ways, it was asking the genre to evolve, because as influential as Tolkien has been, we’re at a point where the fantasy genre isn’t really moving outside of these narrowly defined categories of what fantasy has been. And fantasy that doesn’t imagine moving beyond that? That’s a waste of the genre and ideas.

But Inquisition… Inquisition wants to play those Tolkien style tropes far straighter than they’ve been in the past. And it doesn’t reconstruct them first. It just acts like that classic interpretation of things has been in play since the beginning, even though it hasn’t, and, in multiple cases, actively set out to go against them.

Dragon Age began with a lot of deconstruction of the fantasy genre, in some ways asking ‘is fantasy going to stay where it is or grow and evolve?’ And if Inquisition is an indication, the answer is apparently ‘stay where it is.’ Which if you ask me, that’s a damn shame, because there’s a lot that can be done with fantasy, if someone would just take the chance. I hope future games will.