DA II: I’m so queer I can’t even game straight.

So my long-awaited (and wisely withheld) copy of Dragon Age II arrived about a week ago, and it has been glorious.

I'm about 2/3rds of the way through my second full play-through, which means I've finally seen enough of the game overall to have opinions, finally. Obviously, since this came out in early March I am officially Late To The Party^TM, but bear with me.

Fair Warning: I'm going to aim to avoid any major spoilers, but basic plot and structure elements are assumed to be free game for the purposes of review/comparison. If that's not something you're into, stop reading here.

One of the things I really liked about Dragon Age: Origins was that it was one of the few fantasy worlds -- including literature and film -- that I've encountered where I felt like I could plausibly exist. I realize that including sexuality in games at all is sort of controversial (or at the very least a bit discomfiting to certain groups of people), but for it to be present, and in ways that allowed players to have a same-sex romance without it being cause for discrimination was something that kept me coming back as a player. And really, DA: O earned its ESRB M rating several times over. Ferelden during a Blight? Kind of an ugly and terrifying place to be.

Incidentally, I don't want to give the impression that I was only into DA: O for the relationship factor. Fact is, DA: O is also the lushest piece of world-building I've seen in a single console game. It packs a huge amount of story into a single play-through, but it really shines in terms of replayability. Once you've got a first frame of reference it's absolutely astounding to see how everything ties together, how it can change, etc.

So DA II has some pretty damn big shoes to fill. How well it does that is something I'm still kicking around a little.

Whereas DA: O spanned a continent and saw our protagonist vying for the support of multiple factions in an effort to turn back an army, DA II narrows the scope a bit. It takes place almost entirely in the city-state of Kirkwall in the Free Marches. Where space and diplomacy was the epic playground in DA: O, DA II's epic scope is all about long swathes of time. This makes sense, considering that Hawke -- the protagonist in DA II -- is a Fereldan refugee whose family flees to Kirkwall in the wake of Ostagar.

Unlike the Gray Wardens of DA: O, Hawke has every reason to stick around and settle in. Character-wise, this makes a lot of sense. It's also an interesting change of pace from DA: O, because it gives players another look at life in Thedas that doesn't involve the Wardens overmuch. If anything, we're getting a better grip on the kinds of lives characters from DA: O might lead.

The disadvantage, of course, is that the world feels smaller. Time is a less tangible dimension to play with, and while it allows for some really satisfying payoffs as the game progresses, I miss some of the cultural exchange. That Hawke can only be human, and that there's only one origin story, compounds this more than a little. The variety of character backgrounds in DA: O helped show off the world building, and keeping some of that on the table could have enhanced DA II a great deal.

That being said, DA II is full of little treats for players who come to it from DA: O. Thedas really is a small world after all. Seemingly incidental NPCs from the first game (and characters from the Awakening expansion) get their time in the sun in DA II, and some significant story elements tie in to the events of DA: O. Players who skipped the first installment will miss out on a lot of this -- there are a couple of really fabulous moments in DA II that almost made me drop my controller, they were so awesome -- but newcomers should be able to follow along more or less.*

(*By "more or less," I mean that you're missing out if you haven't played the first game, so go out right now and pick up DA: O -- ideally with Awakening -- if you're playing DA II without it. If you like DA II, you'll want these moments. Trust me. Also, importing data from a previous game changes some things in subtle but recognizable ways, so you'll want to give that a go at least once.)

And, of course, the relationship factor is still there. This time, all of the available main companion characters* can be romanced by a same-sex Hawke, and one of them can make the first move under the right circumstances. This apparently caused a bit of controversy -- which Bioware rose to pretty spectacularly, after which my heart grew THREE SIZES -- but after playing through I'm of the opinion that players who aren't keen for a bit of hot man-on-man action can easily avoid it with a single dialogue choice. And, frankly, the scenes we get when characters do hook up is significantly less explicit than what we got in DA: O. Which, with the exception of various rendering issues, is on a par with what one might see on certain cable programs. In DA II, what we see could almost certainly air on the networks.

(*Not all of the companion characters are up for a romance with Hawke, and Sebastian from the DLC is apparently the only straight man on Thedas.)

Overall, DA II is a satisfying play*. It seems serviceable as a stand-alone, but players will miss out on a lot of the grace notes (and even a good chunk of the melody) without the earlier titles. This includes, I think, elements of how the main arc plays out, since players more accustomed to mainstream heroic titles may be a little shocked by what heroism (and its consequences) looks like in the Dragon Age game line.

(*Unless you like your game Achievements to come dearly. DA II is...exceedingly gentle on this point. I'm not sure how to feel about this.)

If DA II has a major flaw, it's that the world is smaller, both in terms of geography and in culture. For players who take the series as a whole, the events of DA II add a lot to the overall flavor of life in Thedas. It also feels more linear than DA: O -- and I use that word advisedly, because DA: O was actually very linear in spite of feeling quite open -- which isn't necessarily a fault, but I might have liked just a little bit more sandbox to play in. I also worry a little that the popularity of the first game may have resulted in some slight loss of edginess overall, though I think some of that comes down to the focus of DA: II being less about bodily integrity and more about politics.

One thing that's true of both of games in the series is that the only obviously transgender characters are prostitutes. On the one hand, this is pretty solid commentary in that in some parts of the world (including sometimes the US), sometimes this is the only work we can get. On the other, that's...well, more than a bit problematic. The Dragon Age games are queer-positive enough overall that I try to read the way these very, very incidental characters are played in a neutral light, but that's a little bit challenging because depicting a character as explicitly trans can require some genuine awkwardness, and that's hard to do when you've only got a split second to do it, and the vast majority of the population isn't yet savvy enough to understand what they're seeing. Still, it's food for thought.

For me, DA II is an excuse for me to go back to DA: O again, and to pick up Awakening this time around. It's chewy stuff, and I have a deep and abiding love of little details. Bioware do a great job of this. As a writer, I'd love to leaf through their notes sometime. The documentation must be intense.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com