Draggin’ your companions around
“There’s a recipe to a good hero, Hawke, it’s like alchemy. Take one part down to earth, one part selfless nobility, two parts crazy fool, and season liberally with wild falsehoods. Let that percolate through a good audience for a while, and when you’re done, you’ve got your hero”. Varric
“But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke.” Ishmael
The threat was realized, the riots had begun. Only a specific holy relic could stop them. Good news! I knew where that relic was, and was on my way to collect it. Bad news? I had sort of promised it to a friend of mine, for her to use hundreds of miles away. To which do I give greater weight: the lives of hundreds of citizens to whom I owe little to nothing, or the life of a friend to whom I made a promise?
Dragon Age 2 is about friendships and loyalty. Family, duty, and interpersonal connections. At the end of the game there is a choice to be made. You don’t know what that choice means, but that’s almost besides the point. What matters is why we chose to do what we chose to do. I chose friendship. In return, my friend chose me.
As important as your friends are, Dragon Age 2 is a story about you, and your exploits. It is not a story told by you. In fact I’ll say that it’s unique among games in that– within the fiction of the game– it is a story that is being told. And it is being told by an unreliable narrator. Video games may not have found their Citizen Kane, but they certainly do seem to have found their Moby Dick.
I hated Moby Dick. Dragon Age 2 would be a far superior work of literature if it’s only virtue were the omission of anything resembling Moby Dick’s Chapter 32. Dianu.
The story of Dragon Age 2 is told by a friend of yours. A Dwarven man named Varric. He’s a self confessed liar, with a nose for adventure and profit. Other friends include a blood mage named Merrill, the captain of the City Guards, a former slave, an apostate and (former?) Gray Warden, and a pirate.
In a large departure from the fantasy RPG norm, the player is not able to outfit and dress up companions. Fantasy RPGs, much in like fantasy football, statistics min/maxing is very much what people play for. And yet, it doesn’t really fit the theme of this game very well. Your companions are just that- companions. Friends. You are not their commander, you are not on a mystic quest to save the world. It is very rare that I go into my friend’s homes and decide what they will wear– games shouldn’t be different. Thus a simple mechanical change reinforces the theme of the game.
The end of the game involves a friend doing a Very Bad Thing. That friend will do that Very Bad Thing pretty much regardless of what you do. Your choice is how you respond. For all it’s myriad faults, Dragon Age 2 does a good job at representing this key aspect of human existence: we cannot know the outcomes of our decisions. They may be good, bad, or irrelevant. What’s important is the attitude with which we confront those choices, and the reasons behind our decisions. The game presents a much narrower scope of action than I would like. But as a meditation on human existence, it works quite well.
