In my heart I'm bathed in a golden light

When I was a kid, I thought RPGs were the greatest thing ever and FPSs were for noobs. Now I now that FPSs are awesome and RPGs are satisfactory average. However, I still enjoy the occasional story-based RPG, like Mardek. Sure, RPGs like Sonny can be amazing for their combat, but ultimately I prefer story0based RPGs. And when you think story-based RPG, what company do you think of? Bioware. Hence I brought Dragon Age: Origins...

...and was incredibly disappointed. To be fair, this is mainly because I expected Jesus to pop out of the game box and tell me all of my sins have been absolved because the awesome on the disk in front of me could not be contained and spread to everyone who played the game. Furthermore, the game's best writing is contained within the first six hours, so I was even more convinced that good things would happen if I played the storyline through to the end. I beat the final boss, watched the ending, and was disappointed.

So I'll start with the storyline. The good things about the storyline centered mostly around the origin story and how that affects the rest of the game. Unfortunately, the origin stories vary so zetta wildly in quality that this means some playthroughs will inevitably be better than others. I first played the game as a dwarf commoner, whose origin story starts by a gang lord telling your sister about all the great places he's going to take her as a concubine and then turning to you and telling you who you're going to kill today. "Holy fuck!" I said, "This game is awesome!" Unfortunately, this doesn't describe my enthusiasm for all the origin stories. Let me tell you how the entire human noble origin story goes: Look. Family. BAM! And then it ends.

And then there's the game's insistence on using characters you'll meet later in the game to carry across the origin stories. I knew my family was going to die in the human noble origin story because I had already met their murderer in a previous playthrough. It's like if the back of the box made the storyline less Haze-y (get it?) by telling you how the game ends.

The origin stories are referenced throughout your adventuring career, but not nearly enough. For the most part, you'll only notice a difference when you return to the location of your origin story. And sometimes this is awesome. But not always. There was also another point where a ghost will manifest as a character from your origin story that I found rather intriguing, but that was one moment. I noticed a wasted potential when a demon forces me into a dream that is the same dream no matter what factoring origin story your picked. For zetta shame, Bioware! The origin stories were a good idea that needed to be applied properly.

And, quite zetta sadly, the majority of the strength of Origin's writing is the second person part. The only other time a video game has made me feel guilt was the bad ending of Bioshock. By giving the player choice and by making consequences for them, Bioware delivered the exact same feeling. Now, there are choices you can make outside of the origin story, but you don't see the consequences until the guilt-free slideshow ending. Once, I slaughtered an entire village of elves, and no one cared outside of my party members offering a line or two of comments and then dropping the subject. Granted, the elves were isolationists, but shouldn't someone notice? Shouldn't my party members be a bit more opinionated about genocide? Similar events happen throughout the story. The world doesn't live or breathe, it stands still until it ends.

The overarching plot wasn't that great either. The zombie-like darkspawn try to kill everyone for the fifth time in their zetta feeble existence, but some idiot stops you from stopping them for the greater good. What the hell? The game goes out of its way to paint this villain as not selfish and an intelligent man. Yet he still nearly causes the destruction of an entire nation. Thank you, Bioware.

However, talking to your party members in between combat was surprisingly delightful. Each of them felt distinct, even if some of them were annoying (STEN AND ALISTAIR!). Many were worth talking to again on a repeated playthrough. The problem is, the game keeps track of how nice your responses were, and being nice has an objective gameplay benefit (more quests, items, and stat bonuses). I didn't feel like roleplaying because their is zero reason to be mean to a character, even if roleplaying says I should Leliana for being a self-righteous bible-thumper. As with the rest of the game, the system wasn't bad, it just could've been more.

And then combat. Short version? The low-budget flash game Sunny had better combat. The problem isn't necessarily the level design or the actual mechanics of the combat, it's the skills. Uncreative. Repetitive. Dull. Uninteresting. Each of them has been used in another RPG at least a thousand times before. Because of this, their's not much adapting to do for each encounter. For much the same reason, character building is also boring. I did find the specialization feature interesting since, unlike the rest of the skills, each specialization offered a very different experience, and you get two, so you have to mix and match well. But that's all their was to it, and that's a choice you make twice per character.