Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Worth playing"

When you think of Japanese developed RPGs, you tend to think of companies like Square-Enix. When you think of Western developed RPGs, companies like BioWare come to mind. BioWare is known for making lengthy quests that consist of a multitude of characters, intertwining the journey with story branches that are affected by moral decisions. Dragon Age is their newest role-playing franchise, and it's guaranteed to whet the appetite of gamers looking for an old-fashioned RPG full of castles and dragons.

There is unrest in the land of Ferelden. Every several hundred years, a blight occurs, flooding the surface with countless demonic creatures known as Darkspawn. Archdemons in the forum of menacing dragons rally these evil forces, and Ferelden's only defense are a band of specialized warriors, mages, and rogues known as the Grey Wardens. The Grey Warden Duncan stations himself at Ostagar alongside King Cailan in an attempt to stave off an invasion. When things go horribly wrong, Ferelden suddenly finds itself in need of a new Grey Warden in order to unite its lands and defeat the blight. Thus your quest begins.

Dragon Age: Origins is an action-RPG where every action happens in real time. As you're leveling up, you'll unlock many different abilities. You'll open up a radial menu (which pauses the action so you can plan ahead) that will allow you to select from all the different commands, but you can also assign two sets of three commands each to your face buttons. You'll also find other commands such as ordering your party to hold their position as well as swapping from melee to ranged weapons in your radial menu.

The game begins by having you create your own character. It may not be as in depth as BioWare's other games, but you can still create many interesting looking characters. You can pick one of three races: humans, elves or dwarves. Next, you'll choose a primary class. You have your typical warrior, mage and rogue, and each one has four unique specializations that unlock later in the game that grant new abilities and stat attributes. To unlock some of the later classes, you'll need to talk to your party members and see which one is able to teach what.

Once you finally have your character created, you'll be thrown into a city dependent on what race you selected. From hear, you wander around talking to different people, and important NPCs will give you quests. You can pull up your quests via the codex, which also stores a library's worth of information on the game's universe. Most quests are pretty straightforward, but some become frustrating because they won't have a guide marker on your map pointing you directly where you need to go. You'll have to just stumble across a certain person to luck out and finish the quest.

When you leave town, instead of there being a giant open world to explore, you'll be given a map with key destinations to travel to. Some places will be locked out, requiring you to visit a nearby location first and travel through there to reach it, while others only open up during an activated quest. When you pick a spot to travel to, you'll sometimes be interrupted with a random encounter, sucked into a back alley or valley where you're battle marauders or wild animals. Some quests also only end during one of these random encounters, so traveling from point to point is something you'll want to do often.

Combat is a mix of up close melee attacks, ranged attacks with bows and crossbows and of course offensive and defensive magic. Characters under AI control don't quite seem to know what they're doing, so if you want to alter their behavior, you can change their tactics. Tactics allow you to customize each individual action according to a current scenario. For instance, if an enemy is going after one of your mages, you can have your warrior taunt them and become the focus of their attack. The game can easily overwhelm you numerous times, so there's a lot of trial and error to see what works well and what doesn't.

As is common with BioWare, there is a seemingly endless supply of equipment that can be found. Looting bodies provides a good deal of gear as well as in chests and barrels. It's wise to keep a rogue in your party at all times just so they can pick locked chests and doors. The only problem with Dragon Age is that it gives you far too much junk with very little inventory space. The only way to increase your inventory space is stumbling across vendors who sell backpacks, and it is possible to miss out on a few early in the game. Equipment management is also a bit on the cumbersome side since you have so much to sift through. You also can't compare gear at a glance; you have to pull up a separate screen and compare it with another screen to see if a weapon or piece of armor has beneficial stats.

Dragon Age unfortunately is marred with a plethora of glitches and bugs. Some quests will still be in your codex well after you've completed them, while others will fail to become unavailable to you at all. The targeting system also fails numerous times to select exactly what you want, sometimes requiring you to open up your radial menu and manually select a target that way. You'll find that you can't even select an object or body to look at that's right in front of you unless you move the camera around first. Many times, you'll issue a command and you'll hear your character confirm it, but they'll just stand there doing nothing, requiring another press of the X button to get them going. There are even the dreaded game freezing glitches that leave you with no choice but to reset the game. The game does autosave, but it doesn't do it enough, so always remember to save your game frequently.

Graphically, Dragon Age is a mixed bag. You could say that the game's visuals are similar to a Monet painting. From far away, everything looks beautiful and well-rendered. There's a good level of atmosphere that paints the game's setting, but when you see the environments up close, especially characters during cutscenes, that's when the quality really drops. The textures become sloppy and rough around the edges, and hair moves through clothing and armor. There's a lot of clipping issues, actually, and it's really disappointing to see all these graphical flaws when BioWare's own Mass Effect games look infinitely better. Even some of the special effects look like they should belong on the PS2, not on the PS3. The frame-rate also dips down into the single digits when there's too much action on screen.

If you know BioWare games, then you know that their strongest suit comes in their voice acting talent. Dragon Age is no expection. Every main character you acquire and every other character you encounter are voiced very well, showcasing a range of emotions that give them depth. A couple of key voice actors worth noting are Steve Blum as Oghren and Simon Templeman as Loghain. Unfortunately, the biggest problem is that your own character has no voice, making him feel incredibly shallow and practically lifeless. Another strong facet of the game's audio is the soundtrack. It's expertly composed, and it gives the entire game a wonderful fantastical feeling. Nothing really stands out in the way of sound effects, though. Everything comes across as pretty standard fair.

Dragon Age: Origins is a pretty epic game in the way of storytelling, but its gameplay and presentation fall short thanks to an underwhelming presentation and a myriad of glitches. Still, the content contained within is enough to keep RPG fantatics busy for weeks, maybe even months on end. The moral choices you're presented with encourage replayability, and even more so should you chose play as a different race. Dragon Age: Origins just needed more time in the pot to simmer into something exceptional. If only the bugs could have been ironed out, the graphics polished, and your main character been given a voice, the game could ended up being one of the best Western RPGs of this generation.