Recent reviews by Frandoka

What is there to say…

A big topic surrounding this game is obviously the woke stuff, especially non-binary identity issues. Does it have a place in Dragon Age? Yeah, it has a place in Dragon Age! The same as slavery, racism, and genocide are part of the Dragon Age world. So are heartache, sadness, anger, and any human emotion or experience. All of these are possible to write about in the Dragon Age world. But to play it safe? Well, then it’s boring.

I get it—there would be very bad PR if you could be extremely mean or unsupportive to Taash, with dialogue clips going viral across the Internet. Think about Red Dead Redemption 2, where a suffragette woman got punched and run over by a train. But… this franchise is known for giving players a choice in how to respond to the personal developments of its companions. If you remove that, you’re going to make them boring.

And for me, that is one of the worst parts of the game: the companions you interact with are boring. All of them are super positive and nice to each other. With the exception of Taash, I haven’t heard anyone crack a joke or make a funny remark. Taash is the only one who did, which made me like them more. I heard the writers left somewhere during the development of the game, and it shows. Painfully.

The plot is whatever—just copy-paste Corypheus two times, and here you go! That’s your bad guys! Solas’ stuff is really cool, though. I wish there was way more of it. They set him up to be the big bad in the Trespasser DLC, and then he trips, falls, and is… barely in the game. Still, when he is, it’s good.

Also, limiting the party to two companions and giving them, like, three skill abilities each—where using one makes all the abilities go on cooldown—reduces companions to the usefulness of a belt or ring with a skill. Companions barely do any damage, even on story mode. Honestly, WTF did they do to the party-based combat?

If this game wasn’t called Dragon Age, it would have been the smart decision to remove the companion system altogether and give the player more combat abilities. Because if respeccing was impossible or hard in this game, it would have been torture instead of just boring. Besides dialogue, what do the companions really add? They just waste buttons on your controller, and this game is clearly made for a controller.

So TL;DR:

- The woke stuff isn’t good or bad—it’s just boring.
- Companions are boring, not fleshed out, and offer limited interaction compared to previous games.
- The story is meh. Only the Solas parts are consistently good; the rest is inconsistent.
- Party-based combat has been gutted, leaving only a shell that harms gameplay.
- It’s a bad console port.

Good: New MP content, amazing prologue, immortal empires and new factions.

Bad: Slow patching.
Realm of Chaos (campaign) sucks.
Immortal Empire (campaign) rocks

Completed on PS4 twice one of the best RPG's in recent memory.