I’ll keep saying it as long as it’s funny and relatively true: The Dragon Age series is a dating sim loosely disguised as an RPG. The big difference between it and actual dating sims is the level of story happening alongside it. Dragon Age II sticks out to me due to the callback to older story structure: the Greek tragedy. But first, let me set the scene.
Another in a long line of starting series in the middle, I picked up Dragon Age II to play first in the series, having heard good things about it from someone online that I looked up to. It’s not a popular opinion to like the second Dragon Age game. It’s rushed, poorly scaled, repetitive, and lacks a lot of the same freedoms that the first game, Dragon Age: Origins was known for. You’re locked in as a human with a static origin: your father was a non-Circle mage and your mother was from a noble family in another country. You have two siblings, one of which will die at the beginning depending on the class you pick in order to keep party balance, I guess.
Maybe having not experienced the freedom of Origins first set me free of a lot of the same expectations other Dragon Age fans had going into the sequel. Maybe it was a result of being recommended by someone who enjoyed it. Maybe it’s my lifelong desire to disagree with popular opinion that led me to name it as one of my favorite games.
I’ve played Dragon Age II probably ten times. Minimum. I played nearly all the different dialogue options, even being mean to my favorite characters. When I was still in high school, the Dragon Age Wikipedia page was my most viewed website, and I probably annoyed the crap out of everyone that would dare to let me talk about these games.
So why is this unpolished turd of a game my favorite?
Simply put, it’s the storytelling – the good and the bad.
It’s not perfect, and I’ll never defend it for being perfect. What I do argue is that it’s enjoyable to the right people.
Pick your favorite story driven RPG. What are the major plot points and turning points in the game? If choice is available, are you able to circumvent all tragedy you might face with enough foresight, player guides, or experience from several run-throughs? A lot of RPGs allow for several ending variations if player choice effects story elements, but there is typically a “good” option available for the player to work towards.
Dragon Age II completely disregards that in favor of a very obviously structured three act story where the playing character, Hawke, is at their happiest and best situation near – but not quite at – the end of the second act. A traditional game would generally end there, but this isn’t a story about giving Hawke the best life, it’s about hearing out the story of how we got here – “here” being the event that happens at the end of the game that throws the world into chaos, setting up the events of the next game, bridging Origins and Inquisition is the way a sequel needs to do.
(Not that Bioware is keeping Dragon Age to the traditional trilogy format, but the function of Dragon Age II fits well into what a sequel is supposed to accomplish even if it doesn’t stand up well as a standalone game.)
What’s the best thing about the game is the hanging tragedy over your head as you play. The game is constantly reminding you that as you progress through the game, the closer you drag your hero to some horrible event. Of course, the three act structure lets us know that we’re not there yet, that the worst hasn’t even happened yet, even as Hawke suffers loss at every turn.
The game drags Hawke through the dirt, and something about the character continuing to fight on is inspiring. You don’t feel like a hero. You feel like the wrong person at all the right times. You go from a refugee, to a (sort of) re-established noble, and then to the Champion of the city-state you reside in.
Hawke loses their father, then their sibling, then their other sibling (this being the only fate of a family member you have any control over, but they still leave your party), and then your mother is essentially murdered by a man you investigate several times through the course of the first and second acts. The only people left around Hawke by the end of the game is the friends they made along the way. The friends might not all like each other, but regardless, they form together as a group around Hawke whether it’s out of a sense of loyalty, to repay a perceived debt, and so on. Boil it all down to the base reason, most of these friends/party members you can gather stick to Hawke for protection, because they have no one else, and a sense of belonging. There’s something that feels inherently universal about that.
The storytelling of Dragon Age II resembles less if the traditional format that we’re used to in Western – and specifically American – storytelling and more of a Greek tragedy. It follows the structure of a Greek tragedy almost to the letter. The prologue gives us the setting, the motivation, and background of the main character. Then we have the parodos, the actual “start” of the story, which introduces the characters. Then is the stasima, which comments on the story as it goes, in this case using Cassandra’s interrogation of Varric in place of the choral interludes. Last is the exodus, the ending of the story, and as you might expect from a tragic story, these endings aren’t typically happy ones.
Even the lack of travel, also a staple of Origins and Awakenings (a continuation of Origins), fits a concept in Greek tragedies: the Aristotelian “Unity of Place.” While this was meant for the stage, saying that the stage shouldn’t represent more than one location, a video game doesn’t necessarily have the same constraints of the set design or asking viewerss to imagine too many different locations as they watch a play without set design. Still, the game is centered in one city that the player navigates within the interpersonal complexities of status, poverty, classism, oppression, and so on. Not to mention it would be hard to be the Champion of a single city-state if you were visiting other cities fairly often.
The purpose of Greek tragedies were, at least to a certain degree, to evoke catharsis in the viewer. We don’t think of catharsis in the same way as Ancient Greek storytellers viewed it as we have a firmer grasp of psychology these days and know that we don’t need to purge certain feelings in order to be a healthy individual. However, experiencing a range of emotions in a single piece of media feels satisfying. Myself in particular, I enjoyed choosing the “purple” or sarcastic/joking dialogue in stressful situations at the expense of being taken seriously.
Lastly, we fall to the message or lesson to be taken from the story. In The Odyssey, it is pride that is Odysseus’s downfall, and it costs him everything from the lives of his crew to the lost time with his wife and child. For Dragon Age II, there isn’t a clear message being sent through the storytelling. There’s too many quests and side plots to pick one main lesson for the entire story, but the biggest conflict in the game is the dynamics and politics of oppression.
In Act I, we follow the Hawke family in trying to keep their family together. Either Hawke (if you play a mage) or Bethany (if you play rogue or warrior) are at risk of being hauled away for the rest of their lives if anyone finds out they possess magic. They need money and status to protect themselves – money to pay off blackmailers and status to be above persecution.
This is also clearly articulated by three of the main areas: Hightown, Lowtown, and Darktown. Hightown is for the nobles and the merchants and the Chantry, a religious institution with a lot of power. Lowtown is for the poor and the barely-making-it-by, not to mention home for the Alienage, the only refuge for the small community of city elves. Darktown is for the rest, for those that can’t even afford Lowtown. Despite Darktown being the last place for people to exist, Lowtown is not viewed as a place for the people in the middle, because there is not “middle.” You’re either doing well, not doing well, or a literal beggar.
Act II defines the conflict between the people and the Chantry. The Qunari, who value order and prosperity instead of things like personal freedoms, see the inequality and deem the city unfit, corrupt, and in need of order to protect the weakest from the strongest. Of course, this doesn’t work, and the failed coup to take the city sparks a power vacuum to which those in power take advantage of.
Last is Act III, the beginning of the end. The first decision you make in this act is to take the side of the Templars who serve the Chantry, or to help the mages that are imprisoned by the Templars. By the end of the act is the final tragedy, the literal destruction of the Chantry and all those in it, done by one of your party members.
Straying a bit from the convention of teaching a moral lesson, Dragon Age II utilizes it’s choice focused storytelling to posit a question instead.
How do we respond to inequality?
Video Games Deconstructed 