Dragon Age II Review
Dragon Age II represents just about everything typically associated with a Bioware-developed RPG. Compelling stories, well-developed and interesting characters, witty banter that makes you just want to stand there and listen all day, lots of player choice and freedom, and more side quests than you’ll ever know what to do with. But this also means it came with its own fair share of bugs, glitches, graphics mishaps, and low performance.
Now, it is important to note that my first playthrough here was on the Xbox 360 console. However, having released in March 2011, the game has been out for over 4 years and has plenty of time to patch things up.
Overall, I loved it. My 20-something hour playthrough of Dragon Age II is easily something that helped get me through my last year of university classes. I felt a certain “pull” to play, something I hadn’t felt in a while. I cared about the characters I was involved with, and I wanted to see where the story went.
Having only briefly played a bit of Dragon Age: Origins in the past, my Dragon Age experience was fairly limited, but it didn’t seem to matter. A specific story developed throughout Dragon Age II, and they introduced the right elements to make me care about it. My decisions were shaped around who I wanted my character to be, and what I thought about the world’s events. New players are caught up to speed enough to fully enjoy the game, but veterans are certainly rewarded through their more detailed understanding of the lore and past events, along with being able to bring along their developed character from the previous title.
Throughout the game, I really felt like my character developed a lot, personality-wise. I even started to form a bond with him. (It helped that mid-way through my playthrough I watched through the entire Merlin television series - which, of course, had a similar storyline of magic being banned and fighting for the rights of those with magic, etc. It was fun to draw parallels between the two.)
Even the way the other characters in the world reacted to me was impacted fairly significantly by my actions and choices. For the most part, it felt pretty natural. At least, if you ignore the fact that characters never actually left my party or turned against me unless it was a major story part. That got kind of weird when I reached the last major point in the story and suddenly my party options were cut in half.
In terms of combat mechanics, I never feel like I went anywhere with my character. Combat never got any more challenging, as long as I continued to use my skill points upon leveling up, I was always super OP in combat. Only right at the end did I ever struggle with battles. I only had a few deaths throughout the whole game, and they were all within the last 2-3 hours-ish of gameplay.
With that, I also never found any gear I “liked.” As I would do in any game, I continued to swap out my gear as I found more powerful options - *which was incredibly frustrating when 99% of the gear I found was for some reason restricted to only my character, and not the rest of the party. I never came across a badass staff or amazing-looking armor for my character. In fact, most of the armor I ended up in throughout the game looked pretty terrible on my character. Being used to MMOs and games that focus primarily on the gear, Dragon Age II’s gear was… underwhelming.
The pacing of the game felt kind of strange, too. I couldn’t always tell what quests would move the story along and which ones were side quests - especially when I loaded up a ton of quests and just started plowing through them. This is how I actually ended up beating the game.. I was doing a bunch of side quests, and then the next one I picked ended up being a main story quest which launched the events for the end of the game. Came out of nowhere. Obviously these games are years apart, but The Witcher 3 handles this perfectly. I haven’t played Dragon Age: Inquisition yet, but hopefully it accounts for this as well.
Again, I was playing on peasant console Xbox 360, but there were tons of bugs, quests that I could not ever complete due to them bugging out, graphical glitches and overall poor performance throughout the game. Frame rates were the first thing to go during big battles and lots of loading times.
I would have loved to add the DLC content to my playthrough, however even just one small piece of the DLC costs many times more than I paid for the core game itself. It’s hard to justify dropping $30 on DLC for a 5 year old game that you only paid $5-$10 in the first place for. DLC prices really need to start adjusting at the rates that the games themselves do.
But overall, I had an absolute blast playing through Dragon Age II. I was a bit nervous to pull it from my shelf and invest in it during my final semesters at university, but it was probably the best choice I have made. Anyone looking for an quick bargain game pick, pick up Dragon Age II. If you enjoy western RPGs, you will love this game.
Thank you for watching my review of Dragon Age II. Be sure to leave a like and a comment on the video, and subscribe to this channel for more gaming content. Do you want to see what I think of Dragon Age: Inquisition or Origins? Let us know!
Until next time, my name has been Adam or EposVox, have a good one.