Despite having played only two entries, Dragon Age has built up an intimidating aura for me. It's a series that augurs gloom and frustration, rivaling (and at times surpassing) the most vexing games on the NES. The first two Dragon Ages are long, hazardous affairs that will have you routinely rifling through your inventory and nervously stockpiling potions, because you've experienced firsthand how ruthless the journey can be. Time and time again, you'll suffer that one downed party member or mis-timed spell that rapidly results in a team wipe—seriously, just look at the sky horror fight from Dragon Age 2. You may not rack up as many "game overs" as other notorious classics, but fights are both long and swingy, making defeat more crushing than whenever Simon Belmont accidentally slips into a pit.
So naturally, I went in trepidatious of Dragon Age: Inquisition. And while it's more difficult than any of the Mass Effect titles, it was also much, much more lenient than its ancestors. Potions are limited but always restock at camp, fights don't drag for nearly as long, and you won't have to deal with a figurative flood of reinforcements raining down on you like in Dragon Age 2. There are some unfortunate downgrades with the transition to open world, but Inquisition remains the "friendliest" Dragon Age, being easy to understand while simultaneously offering loads of tactical depth to sink your teeth into. And your chompers better be sharpened because there is a ton of Inquisition to devour—arguably far too much.
At the core of Dragon Age: Inquisition is a troubling question: what content is worth experiencing? You are presented with a lot of quests in Inquisition, but outside of the main story bits (which require levelling up to access) you are left on your own to explore the world. While each locale has a main objective woven into it, these are often vague and imprecise: "go stop bad guys" or "look for grey wardens" or "find out what the bad guys are doing here." Questlines in previous games were more rigid and direct, telling their own little story or wrapping up in unexpected ways (I was woefully unprepared for Gaxkang). Meanwhile in Inquisition you'll run into quests frequently and randomly, covering your map in objectives that have the most tenuous of stories attached to them.
And though not all the quests are pointless (I enjoyed a couple of the companions' missions) it's difficult to tell which quests will be meaningful as opposed to those that sorta just... end. I played a ton of this game—over 100 hours worth—scouring the world for interesting stories... but there's honestly not that much that I can recall. There was that one haunted mansion, the barbarians in the swamp, the flooded town, and... that's mostly it? Everything else was an outpost you needed to attack, a corpse you needed to investigate, or an item you needed to collect. Occasionally you come across some cool moments, like stumbling upon a dragon nest in a coliseum or exploring a temple frozen in time, but these aren't storylines as much as they're just "neat" events you'll gradually forget.
The main story on the other hand fares much better in comparison, telling a riveting tale that outdoes both Origins and 2. Where most other games skirt the religious implications of being the "Chosen One", Inquisition embraces it wholeheartedly, acknowledging that some interesting problems arise from your deific duty. Do you actually think you're ordained by the Maker? Do you think it is your duty to right the wrongs of the world? Would you play kingmaker and willingly let a ruler whom opposes you fall? Additionally, Inquisition bears some fascinating lore implications for the Dragon Age universe, but almost all of it is constrained to the main story and subsequent DLC. If you stray off the main path, prepare for a lot of bland fetch quests with mundane conclusions, which only serve one purpose: to feed you XP for the long road ahead.
I'm of two minds about Inquisition's combat: on one hand it's very accessible and well-balanced, but lost are the explosive moments from launching key spells. That trade-off was inevitable if the series ever sought to shake its CRPG roots, but it renders a lot your abilities as low impact. Enemies are still able to shred through HP like tissue paper, mind you, so you'll just have to be more active about using your abilities; no longer can you rely on the tried-and-true "hold the choke point and fireball everything." And while there are a couple of death-dealing combos you can discover (Hidden Blades + Mark of Death = 80k damage, RIP last boss) for the most part you'll have to rotate through abilities more often in order to survive. It keeps combat interesting, but piles more busywork onto the player.
Thankfully, Inquisition offers the console player a saving grace: finally you're given the ability to control the pace of battle with a tactical mode! This feature pauses the battlefield and lets you direct party members where to go, which spells to use, and whether to hold their ground, letting you finally control the fight from an overhead perspective. Ironically it's not needed for most of the battles, but its addition is more than welcome in the harder encounters. Dragons in particular have been made more fun than frantic, thanks in part to being able to tell your mindless allies to get out of the goddamn breath attack range. They'll still get blasted occasionally, but at least now you can tell yourself, "I really should've started this fight in tactical mode."
But tactical mode comes with a trade-off: you can no longer customize companion AI, nor bring more than eight abilities into battle. Note that you can alter whether an AI uses an ability or not, as well as learn as many spells as you want, but those two restrictions keep combat from feeling truly free. It can be nice not having to deal with a laundry list of if-then statements, but conversely, it's frustrating to have no control over which target the mage places barrier on, or whom the rogue puts to sleep during combat. Likewise, locking the toolbar to eight powers renders levelling up past 20 as moot, as most of your abilities have been set in stone and already upgraded. Neither of these are detrimental—I'd sacrifice tweaking AI priorities for tactical mode in a heartbeat—but they narrow combat ever so slightly, streamlining the game so it won't appear too complicated.
And yet they kept inventory management complicated—and it sucks.
More than any other game, Dragon Age: Inquisition bogs down your inventory with a ton of clutter. There are dozens of mods, sigils, runes, recipes, remains, and accessories that you'll gather on your journey, and they all take up precious inventory space, requiring frequent trips back home (or at least a vendor). There's plenty of cool gear to happen upon, but the vast majority of it will be a waste of time, thanks in large part to the shoddy UI. The menus are cumbersome to navigate, take forever to load in, and you can't compare unequipped items to one another—hell, you can't even compare stats when looting a chest! Plus you have to endure a loading screen every time you want to access your storage container, and there's no way to sort the damn thing! Whatever open-world gripes I have may be up for debate, but you will never be able to convince me that Inquisition's inventory even approaches the word "decent." How the older games manage to be superior in this regard is beyond me; trudging through your inventory is hands down the worst part of Inquisition.
Runner-up to that terrible accolade is the similarly terrible crafting system that's been senselessly tacked on. Potion brewing was a part of both Origins and 2, but Inquisition steps it up and lets you forge new weapons and armor... which means there's scores of raw materials to gather. It's downright incomprehensible how the game expects the player to keep track of what minerals do what, where to find most of them, and what schematics even utilize them. Buying schematics is an alarmingly dumb process too, as you're not given any details about the item besides its nebulous "tier" ranking. Worse yet is once you dig into the system you'll be overwhelmed with a bevy of mediocre options, most of which fail to compete with the game's unique drops. You honestly only need it if you're underleveled; the less time you spend in the forge, the better.
The last aspect that'll drain you of time is the war table—a feature I'm torn on, like with a lot of things in Inquisition. On one hand the war table features some of the coolest choices and flavor text you'll encounter in the game. On the other... well, it doesn't really do much. Sure, you can send spies to investigate an outpost, rendezvous with seedy figures, and blackmail religious officials into obedience... but it'll just result in riches, treasure, or influence (perk XP) most of the time. Like I said in the Mass Effect retrospective, I typically find the decisions you're forced to make more interesting than their outcomes. But that's not true in all cases, as Inquisition has shown me—sometimes you need something more than "new horse unlocked!" to feel like you've made a difference.
I spent a long, long time with Dragon Age: Inquisition, but I'm not sure it bodes well that I don't have any strong feelings coming out of it. There's definitely plenty that I appreciate—tactical mode, party members, the tremendous worldbuilding—but it took the franchise formula and added a bloat that's hard to overlook. It doesn't feel like a leap forward for the series as much as a side step, one that's overly proud of the size of the footprint left. And while I'm excited where the Dragon Age narrative is heading, I feel strangely disconnected from a lot of my decisions in the game, possibly due to the war table dulling expectations. I wouldn't hesitate to call Inquisition a good game, but it did leave me with a strange feeling, one that lingers like chalk on my tongue: was this truly the experience BioWare wanted to make? I mean, is this really where modern Dragon Age is headed?
Y'know, it's funny: Mass Effect: Andromeda tried its absolute best to copy Dragon Age: Inquisition, when Inquisition is barely worth copying in the first place. It's like cheating on a test by cribbing answers from a B- student.
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