PixlBit

So, I’ve put around 22 hours into Dragon Age: Inquisition (PS4), but rather than complain about all the things I don’t like about the game, I’ll talk about some highlights or things from the game that I’ve enjoyed so far at least.

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The STORY-- main quest anyhow. I was a bit surprised to see time travel in this game. As far as I know, it wasn’t mentioned in any promotional material or previews of the game, or if it was, I may have missed it. Now, I don’t know how much time travel will feature into later parts of the game, as there is a bit of Days of Future past going on near the beginning of the game that I was totally surprised by. I would have liked a full Days of Future past mechanic here where you could jump back and forth in time to alter history like in Back to the Future, or environmental puzzles like in Zelda, but so far, it’s just a little plot twist, with the Mages storyline anyhow. And that’s the thing about these Dragon Age games, the decisions you commit to can alter the game. Now, I created a mage character for my first play through, and when the time came confront either Mages or Templars, I went after the Mages and thus during my encounter with head evil mage, he opened a portal and sent me into the future about 10 years (the bastard!) and I saw what the world looked like with him in power—very grim. Once I fought through the castle, found my friends, and made my way back to the boss fight, I was able to return to present time and possibly prevent that future from happening. Brilliant! The game hooked my right away with that little twist.

Now, the thing is, I also had the option to go after the Templars, and if I had, I’m not sure what the outcome would have been, without checking a wiki or youtube walkthrough of course. I know nothing about this game, so I have no idea what the other outcome would have been, but being a Mage, this story branch fit my story well.

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The WORLD is beautiful! I would be lying if I said I wasn’t in awe of the visuals as I adventured through the large opening maps of the game. I loved the first little big valley area so much, the little hills, mountains, rocky trails, rivers, caves etc, that I spent quite a lot of time just hiking and looking at vistas. Then I unlocked a horse mount and rode around looking at vistas. Yeah, I had fun the first few days running around and splashing through streams and hunting rams and bears, etc. But then after a while the combat started getting very monotonous and I just wanted to move the story forward, and here is my first little gripe, every time I opened a new area, I felt like exploring was akin to being more of a chore, clearing out weeds in a beautiful garden in order to gain power. The maps are very pretty. The rolling waves along the coast, the spooky swamp filled with gouls, even the desert, which I usually hate in video games for their emptiness and lack of architecture and color, looks gorgeous here. But pretty only goes so far, especially in an RPG of this size and length.

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(xenoblade chronicles wii)

This game is more of a single player MMO, which I have no problem with. I loved Final Fantasy 12, Dragons Dogma, and Xenoblade, but I feel like they had more interesting combat. Comparing it to other open world games would be unfair, like Witcher 3 or Metal Gear 5, but the concept of open world has become more prevalent now, just look at new Zelda footage or some gameplay of Final Fantasy 15 which have traditionally contained more corralled content. Even JRPGs like Tales of and Atelier have more free roaming open environments to explore, albeit with not much to uncover. Anyhow, I don’t want to get into what the definition of open world/sandbox is about. Some games are just getting bigger, but bigger isn’t always better. I feel like all this game needs is deeper combat and possibly more interesting side-quests to make it an 8-9-10, but as it stands, it feels very average. I don’t want to be too harsh, but it feels like a lot of glossy visual polish like the way anime is used to gloss over new average JRPGs. That’s only a 20+ hour impression though. My thoughts might change after pushing into the content more, but the combat is really preventing me from wanting to jump back in immediately. It’s become a game that I’ll get back to in a while, after I play a few other things first. 

asreal