Dragon Age: Origins - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers]

I've had a Western RPG gap in my gaming knowledge for far too long. There's a lot of elements about the genre that I love—the D&D roots, the challenging design, the expansive role-playing options—but for some reason I've never been compelled to jump in. Part of it is that I've been primarily a console gamer for my youth, but what's kept me away for the past decade is that the big-name games look daunting. Baldur's Gate II is massive, Morrowind has stolen hundreds of hours from players, and some series like Ultima and Wizardry extend so far back into gaming's history that I didn't know where to begin. On top of this, there are horror stories abound on gaming boards about "wrong builds," "cheap encounters," and most ominously of all, the sempiternal shadow of "game breaking bugs."

But over time, I've come to dabble in CRPGs as more of their systems become mainstream. Bethesda introduced me to Fallout and Skyrim, Larian Studios blew me away with the Divinity: Original Sin games, and I backed a good portion of the CRPG renaissance titles on kickstarter. While I'm still ignorant on a lot of the fabled "classic" RPGs of yore, I think I've gotten my foot in the door with Dragon Age: Origins. Speaking plainly, Origins is a very good game. It's not a revolutionary entry like Skyrim or Mass Effect 2 are, but it doesn't need to be—Dragon Age: Origins is a confident game, one whose strengths easily outshine its weaknesses.

My playthrough of the Mass Effect trilogy came under the lens of an appreciative appraisal, given that I had played the games in their entirety before. However, I'm going into Dragon Age franchise blind, only able to analyze the first game in the series—Dragon Age: Origins—as its own complete experience, uninfluenced by the direction of its younger siblings. And for the most part, it is a complete experience; besides some vague foreshadowing in the Witch Hunt DLC, you'll get a proper beginning, middle, and end to Origins that leaves you feeling satisfied and accomplished. That makes Origins an easy title to recommend to anyone, since you won't have to worry over how future titles will handle your favorite companions, nor will the dread of a divisive ending loom over your playthrough like a ten-story tombstone.

But my recommendation comes with a pretty sizeable asterisk: the combat is no joke. I played on the Xbox 360, which despite being labeled as the "easier" experience compared to the PC version of Origins, was nowhere near easy. "This is a dumb thing to claim," you might critique, "since you played on Hard. What did you expect?" Well, given that I had played through the Mass Effect series on the same difficulty (and Doom Eternal and The Last of Us on their hardest), I was taken aback to find that Dragon Age: Origins put up the biggest fight out of any game I've played this year. Scaling back to "normal" would've alleviated some of my pain, but the source of my agony was the design, not the numbers it was dishing out.

I struggled most at the start of the game for numerous reasons: relatively few crowd control abilities, melee classes lacking decent gear, a dearth of potions provided to the player, the game's healer squirreled away in a tower, and some minor nuisances like fireball being a BS insta-cast spell that applies damage over time AND knockdown. But the biggest culprit would have to be the fact that you can't manually pick and choose where all your party members go, making enemy mages with AoE spells the bane of your playthrough. You'd open a door, see a mage casting fireball, and sigh as you can only direct one unit to safety, the others gawking at the spell like a deer in headlights.

Since you can only control a single character at a time (though you can have each queue up an ability), Origins prioritizing sticking together, which leads to some incomprehensibly annoying behavior. For instance, if you tell your rogue to split off from the group and attack an enemy mage, he'll poke the caster once with a knife and then jog back to your side. Even if you spend some time tweaking the AI "Tactics" menu, you can't cover for every instance—or even every spell! Mass Effect worked fine when you could only control Shepard because you alone were a force to be reckoned with; Origins on the other hand, is in dire need of the spatial strategy granted by controlling individual positions. Without it, be prepared for your party to walk into traps and spells like a lost puppy looking for love.

Eventually, I learned to roll with Dragon Age: Origins' merciless blows. As you come across better gear, more reagents, and the occasional pouch of gold, your faults will gradually get patched over until nary a chink remains in your armor. Once you learn where to acquire for elfroot and lyrium dust for potions you can brute force most fights, and for those you can't you'll have to rely on the holy tetralogy: sleep, fireball, cone of cold, and paralysis. There's some other good ones—I used haste and shock almost every fight—but victory in Origins hinges on who can get off their crowd control spells first, so opening with an immobilization spell will often end a fight before it begins. This can make non-boss battles feel redundant in the endgame, especially once you have two characters that can alternate fireball, but to Origins's credit, I rarely found myself bored with its combat. It's no Divinity: Original Sin, but as far as gameplay in RPGs go, it's absolutely in the upper echelon.

While the combat helped cushion the length of my +80 hour playtime, it was the story that drove me forward, pushing me to explore every corner of the world. The plot may not be as sweeping and grandiose as Mass Effect, but Dragon Age: Origins excels where the spacefaring trilogy occasionally struggled: choices. And not that it provides jaw-dropping ramifications for your actions (though the epilogue may hold a surprise or two), but that the dialogue options present folks that like to play "virtuously" with icky moral quagmires. Do you force your friend into an arranged marriage for the good of the nation? Should treason be punishable by death? For how long are brutalized minorities allowed their bloody revenge?

Although the central plot of Dragon Age: Origins is about as rote as fantasy can get (oh no, super evil faux-orcs want to conquer the world!), it's the intermediary story lines that'll stick with you. Likewise, while your allies will regale you with their own storied histories, it's the party banter they have behind your back that will make you glad you brought them along. In fact it's kind of stunning that BioWare largely dropped the inter-party bickering for the Mass Effect series, since it's a great way to make your comrades more personable beyond asking them twenty questions. I also thought their love/hate reactions to your NPC interactions lend an excellent weight to your decisions, though the bars are hilariously videogamey in that you can shower someone with gifts to make them overlook your extrajudicial killings. Still, it's a cool feature to have that applies a little bit of pressure to every choice you make.

There aren't many reasons I can think of for why one might want to steer clear of Dragon Age: Origins beyond its towering difficulty. At times the game can be fairly crass—expect a lot of women to be threatened with you-know-what—but the richness of the world and its central players do plenty to blunt the edge of the stereotypical "grim fantasy" tropes. Dragon Age: Origins offers a large, realized universe that's not only bursting with content (the tiny Awakening expansion could be its own game!) but also glowing with heart and charm beneath its visually drab exterior. I have yet to dive into the real "classics" of the CRPG era, but if Dragon Age: Origins is any indication, I'm in for a hell of a ride.

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Images obtained from: Biased Video Game Blog, giantbomb.com

Super Mario Bros. - Thoughts

Playing a lot of Super Mario Bros. 35 has given me a newfound appreciation for the original Super Mario Bros. Or rather, a light-appreciation, as I've always been fond of the plumber's momentum-focused platformer. While there's plenty of other games in Mario's rich history that I'd rank over it, the original possesses a crude strength that no other game (besides Land) has: blunt simplicity. There's no in-game story, no overworld, no minigames, no saving, no hidden collectibles; Super Mario Bros. is about running and jumping. And this paucity of systems works because running and jumping as Mario feels very good.

... But this isn't an irrefutable conclusion, unless one spends plenty of time playing and adapting to Super Mario Bros's physics. Compared to Mega Man or Contra, Mario is as stiff and unwieldy as a mustachio'd van, taking too long to accelerate and dangerously too long to stop. To complicate this, certain jumps in the game are downright malicious, requiring a full sprint to cross safely or sporting a single block to land on—and in one instance in 8-2, both at once. The potbelly plumber might not feel natural to control, but mastery lurks within your fingertips—so long as you learn where and when to pump the brakes.

I've never thought of the original Super Mario Bros. as a difficult game (especially compared to the rest of the NES library), but it can definitely be challenging at times. Later stages not only demand precision from your leaps but will also starve the player of resources, reinforcing the importance—and advantage—of a strong start. Sniffing out fire flowers and preserving your 1-ups will help get you to the end faster than having sharp reflexes will... though those don't hurt either. And even when you lose to the likes of World 7 & 8 (the game's real run-enders), you're only ~30 minutes away from reaching your last checkpoint. Throw in some super obvious-to-find warp-pipes and the game can be conquered in 10 minutes by even the most lax speedrunner.

There's a lot to love about Super Mario Bros.'s demure design, though I didn't truly appreciate it as a kid. I always thought Super Mario Bros. was disappointingly "samey", reusing stages, themes, and gimmicks more than I would've liked. And... I wasn't really wrong about that: several levels are repeated with the only identifiable difference being the enemy quantity. But the other stages have a distinct flavor that I hadn't really noticed until now, shaking up the generic "1-1" feel one might have when they think of the game.

For instance, foes in underground sections have darker colors, several stages see Mario running across treetop canopies, 2-3 and 7-3 are dominated by catapulting cheep cheeps, 3-1's black background gives the impression of starless night, 4-3 uses mushrooms instead of trees, and my favorite level 6-3 is drained of color, awash in a lifeless grayscale as if time has stopped. The only stages that radically shake up the gameplay are the underwater sections, though the gravitational pull of the pits combined with the nettlesome bloopers will make you wish every stage was a sprint-fest. Plus there's no power-up blocks deep beneath the waves, making the swimming levels particularly grueling.

Speaking of, I came to appreciate was the elegant nature of the power-up system. Health bars can be a finicky mechanic to design around; they can make enemies feel unthreatening while pits & spikes feel too cruel. But the mushroom acts as a devious bit of insurance: at the cost of expanding your hitbox, it'll protect you from a single attack. The fire flower provides an added reward for playing well, giving you the firepower to deal with some of the worst enemies in the game (like the RNG-nightmare hammer bros), but you'll still get reduced to tiny (regular?) sized Mario should you take a hit. Always being two hits from death makes accidentally speeding off the edge of a cliff a mild aggravation, unlike when you fall to your doom in Sonic with 100 rings in tow.

Prototypical of many of the NES games to come, Super Mario Bros.'s challenge is offset by the speed at which you can blaze through it. In a way it feels like the perfect blend between a platformer and racer, giving you opportunities to find secret coins, stars, and 1-ups should you need assistance, and letting you run full-throttle to the end if you don't. I won't deny that it looks visually plain and lacks dynamic gameplay mechanics, but there's little details sprinkled around that really make the game shine when you ruminate on it in retrospect. In the wide venue of NES platformers, Super Mario Bros. is a meal of unsalted steak and potatoes. It's able to satiate your hunger without stuffing you so full you can barely walk. And sometimes that can really hit the spot.