I Finished Dragon Age: Inquisition!

It was good; I liked it.

I found the ending twist rather surprising (maybe it was easier to spot for people who are really into Dragon Age‘s lore, but I didn’t see it coming), and the denouement eminently satisfying.  As I’ve written several times in the past, I found Mass Effect 3‘s ending lacking, and the fact that the only way for Shepard to survive involves being a colossal jerk to the synthetics was really off-putting (especially after I got really invested in my Shepard-Tali romance), so the fact that Inquisition ends on a high note with no possibility of the Inquisitor dying was really satisfying.  I love BioWare games, but it’s kind of a downer when every story seems to end with the hero dying simply because they’re not willing to screw someone else over (I’m looking at you, Dragon Age: Origins, with your twist that requires having someone sleep with Morrigan regardless of whether she’s been romanced in order for the Warden to survive the final battle); regardless of whether that’s supposed to feed into a larger point about the nobility of self sacrifice, it’s really off-putting when I’m enjoying a game that’s largely a good power fantasy.

Thankfully, EA finally wised up about the marketing and designed the cover art to leave the Inquisitor’s sex ambiguous. (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Fortunately, Inquisition is pretty much all power fantasy.

Perhaps the only frustration I had with the story was regarding my Inquisitor’s romance with Sera.  Sera’s a lot of fun, and I thought her romance plot was really touching in a lot of ways, but it was also really difficult in some ways (at least for the Inquisitor; I resolved early on that I was going to make any decisions necessary to try to see this story to the end, which left the main character agonizing over some difficult decisions).  Because I played as an elf, my Inquisitor’s background was Dalish, who are the nomadic elf tribes who wander the great forests of Thedas trying to hold on to the remnants of their old culture.  The game’s end reveals that the Dalish are pretty much all wrong about their history, which was kind of a big deal for my Inquisitor.  She learned a lot about the true heritage of the elves, and then right after all those revelations got into a big fight with Sera about whether or not it’s all lies.

Sera’s background as a city elf who was orphaned at a young age and adopted by a pretty racist human woman has left her really screwed up in terms of how she views other elves (basically she hates everything about elven culture, real and imagined), and so she’s gleeful over the fact that the Dalish are all wrong about their histories.  She also thinks that everything about elven religion is equivalent to demon worship and wants nothing to do with it.  This situation led to a fight between the Inquisitor and Sera in my game where Sera gave an ultimatum about digging further into elf history.  It was pretty harsh, and there was no way to get her to compromise, so the Inquisitor had to agree to drop the subject; I imagine this was a pretty painful thing, considering how I had played the Inquisitor to take pride in her heritage, even if she wasn’t necessarily a major believer in the elven religion (I think my Inquisitor’s religious outlook ended up tending towards decidedly agnostic).  It wasn’t a difficult decision for me as the player, but in retrospect it was pretty unfair to my character.  Still, I think it’s an excellent bit of characterization, since Sera’s so stubborn and elven Inquisitors have a big disadvantage in trying to romance her.

Setting all that aside, I have to say that for the first time in probably ever, I’m looking forward to seeing what the DLC for Inquisition will be like (I usually come to AAA games so long after their initial release that all the DLC’s been released and I either skip it or end up getting it bundled in with the original game).  I’d really like some closure on Solas (especially since he was my primary mage, and with him disappearing at the end of the game I’m left without one of my key party members if expansions are set after Corypheus’s defeat; he really is like Morrigan 2.0), and I’d kind of dig getting into more of the fallout surrounding the Grey Wardens as well as the resolution of the Orlesian civil war.  Even so, all that’s probably a decent ways off, since we’re only three months out from the game’s original release.

The Great Thing About Dragon Age: Inquisition

I came across this article from Kotaku over the weekend, and it got me thinking about one great thing that Dragon Age: Inquisition does (or, more accurately, doesn’t do): it doesn’t let you romance just anyone in your adventuring party.

I should probably back up a little bit.

Bioware has a long tradition of writing very fleshed out, complex characters in their RPGs, and they always allow players to engage in simulated romances with those characters.  It’s part of the company’s signature storytelling style, and I’m a big fan of it (I seem to recall ranting for a week straight about my disappointment that my Mass Effect 3 playthrough ended with my Shepard dying after I became really invested in his romance with Tali).  The only flaw with this style of storytelling (and it should be telling that no one’s really pointed out this is a flaw before now, as far as I know) is that because Bioware writes stories for games, there’s an underlying assumption that the story must be manipulated in such a way that all of the potential love interests find the player character attractive and are willing to engage in a relationship with that character regardless of eir personality.  The only limiting factor that’s been employed (and even this has been relaxed over time) is based on the player character’s gender; in earlier Bioware games, male player characters could romance pretty much any female character who was intended to be a love interest, and female player characters could do the same with any designated male characters.

Starting with Dragon Age: Origins (if I’m remembering this correctly), Bioware loosened up that restriction and introduced two characters who would be attracted to the player character regardless of gender: Leliana, a woman, and Zevran, a man (this device leads to some interesting speculation about the sexuality of these two characters, who could technically be bisexual, but given the only romantic interest they express in context of the game’s story is towards the player character, it’s in a weird quantum state that leaves their sexuality undefined until the player character’s gender is chosen).  The other two romance options in that game were Morrigan and Alistair, who are straight, thus leaving one of four potential romances unavailable on any given playthrough.

This was a pretty big deal at the time, but it still left the convention of having a very disparate group of people inexplicably attracted to your player character, who could vary wildly in personality and appearance.

Bioware’s been refining that formula for some time, and with each new RPG that they release, they’ve been getting better at implementing more romantic diversity on the axis of sexuality (pushing for better inclusion of gay and lesbian romances in their stories has been a big point of pride for Bioware over the last decade).  With Dragon Age: Inquisition they’ve added a new dimension: non-player character preference.

In Inquisition you have a total of eight characters who are potential romantic partners for the player character, but they carry more restrictions on what kind of player character they will be attracted to.  In reality the only new dimension is that some of the characters have an additional racial restriction on their romances (oddly, the characters with racial restrictions are both straight men; I’m wondering if this is a detail worthy of further consideration), but this extra bit of diversity creates a situation where in a field of very different characters, you really can’t expect them all to be throwing themselves at the player character in a given playthrough (unless you’re playing an elf woman, in which case you have a whopping six potential suitors; I guess even Bioware can’t get away from the fact that everyone loves elves).

Bonus points to me for romancing Sera while playing an elf; she’s apparently less inclined to engage with an elvish character because she was raised by humans. (Image credit: Dragon Age Wiki)

This is a good thing.

Setting it up so that your choices are limited based on your character’s sexuality (exclusively straight or gay characters will automatically have fewer choices than bisexual characters) presents an interesting scenario where it’s entirely possible that if you decide your player character is straight (or gay), you’ll only have a couple choices for romance, and neither of them will be compatible with your character’s personality or fit the type of character you envision your character romancing.  That makes the story feel more authentic, and helps sidestep the wish fulfillment problem where you will always be able to find a character type who fits what you’re looking for.  It opens up possibilities to actually deal with romance plotlines in the game as simulations of realistic relationships, where you can’t get everything you want from a person, and you have to navigate that gray space where you either compromise in order to try to grow together or you break it off because you really don’t see it working (for what it’s worth, I happened to hit the jackpot on my playthrough as a lesbian elf; I romanced Sera, who’s hilarious, but a difficult relationship to balance considering she’s in tension with all the more complicated interests that come into play when you’re managing an international paramilitary organization that has to play politics with all the people that Sera, as a defender of the common folk, absolutely despises).

At any rate, I just thought that was something worth considering.  I love that Bioware’s always trying to improve their storytelling, and I think they did a bang up job of creating a better variety of scenarios in Dragon Age: Inquisition.  Now if I can just finish my playthrough…

Boxing Day

It’s the day after Christmas, and I’m preparing to enjoy the second week of my winter break, which is the best time of year aside from the summer break that’s four times as long.  In that time, I hope to do some revision on a short story I wrote during NaNoWriMo (it’s always nice to have goals that don’t involve just sitting on the couch, reading comics and playing video games) and catch up on some podcasts (I’m pretty much over the moon that I got a new MP3 player this year since my last one went kaput over two years ago).  Besides the ambitious goals, I also have all the typical vacation plans of just enjoying my Christmas gifts and then writing furiously about them, because stories are meant to be engaged, and one of my favorite parts of getting into anything new is the chance to think it over and share my thoughts on it.

Anywho, here’s a quick rundown of things that I’ll be mulling over in the near future, as a kind of road map to what I want to discuss in the coming weeks (I’m not going to say in the coming year, because I operate on the academic calendar, and as far as I’m concerned the year ends in May and starts in August).

I’ve picked up several volumes of some comic series that I’ve been excited about following, including the first story arc of the new Ms. Marvel ongoing (I picked the first issue up way back in May and was instantly taken with it), the first volume of Rat Queens (on the recommendation of a friend of Rachael’s, who I now fully trust has excellent taste in comics), and a couple volumes of Saga (I know I said I was going to write about that one at some point, but I never got around to it; maybe with three volumes of the series to read through, I’ll get back to it now).  I expect I’ll have read through all of them before the end of the weekend, so maybe I’ll have something on at least one of those series in the next week.

On the video game front, I’m still working my way through Dragon Age: Inquisition, and I expect I’ll be chipping at that for a while.  If I have any further thoughts beyond, “This game’s a lot of fun, and I really don’t like Vivienne,” then I’d love to share those.  For Alex, who specifically asked me if I’m going to do any writing on Chrono Cross, the sequel to Chrono Trigger, I’d really like to blog through a replay of that game.  It’s an odd one, and it does a lot to complicate Chrono Trigger‘s pretty streamlined narrative (as much as any time-travel story can have), but I remember the game being such a big deal in my mind when it came out simply because it was a sequel to that game that I’d love to revisit it and see how it holds up fifteen years later.

On the front of non-graphical fiction, I’m nearly finished reading the third book in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion saga, and I’d love to mull over that series in depth once I’ve finished with it.  Without getting into too much detail, it’s a series that’s kindled a slight interest in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and also reminds me so much of Mass Effect (which I strongly suspect was cribbing heavily from Simmons’s series).  Also, if I can keep my promise to myself about getting back into podcasts, I might try to write more regularly about stories that I listen to.  I already said it above, but it bears repeating: stories are meant to be engaged.

So that’s what I’m thinking about; we’ll see if I actually stick to any of these plans.  Nonetheless, I hope you all had a pleasant Christmas if you celebrate it, and happy holidays throughout the rest of the season.

I Don’t Remember the Last Time I Disliked a Character This Much

So, I’ve been playing Dragon Age: Inquisition for about two weeks now, and it’s quite good.  If you enjoy games by Bioware, then you will enjoy this one.  Go play it.

Now, moving on from the review portion of the post (that was fast), I want to get to the point: I really don’t like the character Vivienne.  She bugs me.

A lot.

Let’s back up a little bit.  Generally speaking, I’m usually quite fond of the casts of Bioware games.  They’re always a diverse bunch who have differing views on various in-universe issues, which is fine because they’re all well-sketched, and the same is true for Dragon Age: Inquisition.  The rest of my party members are incredibly interesting, and even when I don’t necessarily agree with their outlooks on issues, I tend to still like their personalities.  Not so with Vivienne.

Vivienne’s defining trait (as far as I can tell after about thirty hours of gameplay) is that she’s a dedicated Circle mage.  In Dragon Age lore, mages are treated as highly suspect due to their inherent magical abilities, scapegoating in the dominant religion’s creation story, and vulnerability to possession by malevolent spirits.  In order to curb the animosity that all these factors engender towards mages, the Chantry (the religion that vilifies mages in the first place) has a system of what are effectively cloistered monasteries where mages can live in seclusion from the rest of society.  Vivienne is a major proponent of this system, and sees the protections that it offers mages as well worth the diminished freedom that comes from being wards of the Chantry.

The problem is that Vivienne’s part of a small minority of mages who chose to stay with the Chantry following a vote that the Circles carried out in order to decide whether or not they would leave following the catastrophe that kicks off Inquisition‘s story.  In the course of events, you get the option to work with the rebel mages, and even choose to ally with them as equals, taking the position that they really should be allowed to live free from the Chantry.  I went with this option.

The fact that Vivienne is also the only black character to join your party complicates things in unusual ways. Dragon Age’s world doesn’t suffer from prejudice due to skin color, but her status as a mage still marks her as a member of an oppressed minority that she actively seeks to keep tied to the institution that caused much of the oppression in the first place. (Image credit: Dragon Age Wiki)

Ever since I went with that option, every conversation that I have with Vivienne revolves around her disapproval of the alliance and her concern that the mages are a potential danger without direct supervision of the Templars, a branch of the Chantry who are trained in combating and containing mages.  It could be an interesting dynamic, since my character constantly butts head with Vivienne, but I have a hard time sympathizing with her when she’s speaking from a place of privilege within the Circle system (Vivienne’s backstory explains that she thrived in her Circle and rose to a place of major political power which ensures she enjoys significant freedoms that other mages aren’t necessarily afforded).  Vivienne likes to argue that she believes in the Circles because they’re the only way to ensure the mutual safety of mages and non-mages, not only because unsupervised mages really can be dangerous, but also because people with no magical ability can be extremely hostile towards them.  I understand the argument, but I find it utterly repugnant because it overlooks the fact that much of the hatred that’s directed towards mages comes from the Chantry’s own teachings.

The biggest reason all of this rubs me wrong is that I see some similarities between the situation that the mages face and the one that minorities in America have to deal with.  While mages in the Dragon Age universe do have real destructive power, they’re denied significant social power in the same way that oppressed groups are in the real world.  It’s a factor that does limit the analogy somewhat, but I think it’s still worth pointing out as the real problem within the game world of mages being potentially dangerous dovetails with our fictional narrative in the real world of minorities being actually dangerous.  I see problems with this aspect of Dragon Age‘s world-building because I think it reinforces that real world fiction in subtle ways.

I talked with Rachael some about the topic for this post, and she pointed out to me that there are some complications in criticizing Vivienne’s position.  If she’s an analog for people who argue for a certain way of dealing with minority oppression (the one that most immediately comes to mind in light of all the events out of Ferguson is Charles Barkley) then it’s important to remember that she also has the benefit of being someone within the group who’s discussing the issue, and that merits her some grace from an outsider who disagrees with her position.

I still don’t like her though.