I spent 30 fucking dollars on this trash! What the fuck!?
Rated: 1.5 / 5
What you would like to do in an ideal setting is to take the most realistic objective standards of masculine and female beauty and apply them to the videogame. You don’t want realistic portrayals in that sense because you’re actually taking away from that pocket universe. Realistic portrayals in that you’re 40 lbs overweight or ridden with scars, having a manly jawline and a terrible haircut. Ideally, you want realism, but idealistic realism. That is the ideal of what you might get in reality and apply it to fantasy. That’s a formula that has worked time and again.
Confession, I haven’t played any other Dragon Age game.
…
Let me rephrase that. I haven’t played any other Dragon Age game except for Dragon Age: Origins; and even then, I didn’t play it the whole way through. It’s not that I thought the game was bad per-se. I just had the same issues with that game that I did with Baldur’s Gate. Again, I can’t stress this enough, I am not saying those games are bad. It’s a personal preference regarding gameplay style for me, particularly when it comes to the combat system. At the start, it’s not too bad. But the further into the game I go and acquire more spells and/or abilities, the more I had to pause to select abilities and items for characters in the party to use on either themselves or on opponents. This constant pausing and selecting just kept breaking up the action too much for me to really enjoy it. But I want to enjoy it. I want to try to get myself to enjoy these games and their combat system, because the rest of it is so solid. But I inevitably find myself getting sidetracked onto some other game (or hobby), and by the time I get back I forget where I am and what I should be doing (and no, the quest journals are not enough to help).
Which brings me to this game. At first, this seems to get everything right with combat. No longer was I pausing to select abilities and whatnot for the party to do (at least not frequently). It had a decent AI system that allowed them to take care of themselves and each other. Combat flowed smoothly, and I wasn’t forced to break up the action by pausing and re-evaluating and a regular basis. Which means everything else should just be fine and dandy right?
First of all, they stole my site icon, 2 years before I made it!
Second of all, the characters themselves. Holy shit. This seems to be the game that opened the floodgates for SJW cuntholes to invade the gaming industry and ruin it. I’m not kidding, look at the major characters you have to be around in this game:
Don’t let the men in the poster fool you, this is a game dominated by women, fags, bisexuals, blacks, and people with hairstyles that shouldn’t exist in that universe. Seriously, what’s up with this one duchess who has a hairstyle like she’s one of those Dykes on Bikes? And speaking of hairstyles, I had my character be fucking bald because I fucking hated every fucking hairstyle you could apply to your fucking character. Diversity my ass, they can’t even get a decent mullet or lengthy hair.
And the main warrior lady who leads the team for a good portion of the game, Cassandra. Who somehow has this high position because apparently there aren’t any men capable of besting her or being better than her (she’s the strong one in her empire). And she has this “mightier than thou” attitude where it’s her way or the highway. And this isn’t exclusive to just her character.
most of the “good”, strong, smart, heroic or leading characters were female
most of the “evil”, weak, dumb, devious characters were male
Virtually every female in the game is like this, and they have such power over the men who serve as lackey’s unless they’re a flaming faggot.
The so-called pandering never bothered me until it was accompanied by (a) ret conning and fucking up prior lore (b) rushed, shoddy quality or (c) bad game design decisions.
[…]
I hated Iron Bull and Krem’s stories and stopped playing DA:I shortly after meeting them, though I did know about them. They ruin everything I loved to love and hate about the qunari of Origins and DA2. They are blatant pandering with their nonsense. I’d be a-OK with a trans character– not the idea that qunari would ever tolerate that. Stop trying to make the qunari not conquering zealots. It felt like they knew people liked the race so they tried to make them more tolerable and likeable. That’s the exact opposite of what I liked about them.
The one character that really started to get to me, as much as I painfully tried to ignore the SJW-ness that completely corrupted the entire game, was Vivienne. From her introduction, to this contrived moment where everyone starts singing so she give the protagonist a speech and an “I told you so” moment, even though she hypocritically states her views should be challenged as should the views of all (she can blow that message out her loose black ass, with the way she carries herself, also in a dominant fashion). I really hated this character.
And the character models. Good Christ. As if the gender (identity) politics (and yes, there is a tranny in the game, they had to cover as many bases as possible) weren’t enough to make me disinterested at best and annoyed at worst by these characters, they intentionally made the faces of practically all of them into ugly potato faces.
This is documented by the way, that the developers intentionally made the faces and figures more bland (and unappealing) for the sake of making horny male teenagers less likely to fantasize and jack off over them. I doubt this would stop modders from making beautifying mods on the PC version (which I didn’t buy, due to hearing how much bullshit you have to go through to get the game with the expansion that provides an actual epilogue and true ending to the game, because fuck Bioware), but this game isn’t worth it. The problems run more than just skin deep, though the surface level skin-deep stuff is bad enough to carry over to Mass Effect: Andromeda a few years later.
[…] they bent over backwards to make all the women in the game as unfuckable as humanly possible. But, I don’t play video games to get my jollies so I didn’t really care, for me it was the gameplay was as pleasant as rectal examination so I never finished it. They dropped the ball big time moving away from a strategic combat game to an action combat game. It was poorly executed, unchallenging and boring gameplay.
All this adds up to being surrounded by characters who, for the most part, I really didn’t give a fuck about. I wasn’t interested in their backstories, their motivations, their quips made during dialogue segments while wandering the world. I sure as shit wasn’t all that interested in side-missions tailor-made for digging into the backstory and lore of these characters. Unfortunately, it seems like it is necessary to do some of them in order to progress the story. Whatever.
As for the gameplay itself, like I said, it’s an improvement over the older systems on a personal preference factor. You can shoot magic lights or swing swords or shoot arrows at a whim by holding down a trigger button. Utilize abilities with ease without taking yourself out of combat for too long. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to do combat without ever needing to pause except in emergency moments.
But then it gets to the point where everything gets fucking monotonous. I didn’t have much investment in the side missions. The side missions are repetitious and largely inconsequential outside of boosting up either your XP, or your Inquisition Influence/Power, which basically only serve as a level-up option for your character(s). Aside from that, I didn’t give two shits about the story behind the side mission. I tried at first, but they all got very bland really fast, and all ended up being the same old shit on every map you visit. It was like doing the fucking side quests in Mass Effect 1 all over again.
And speaking of maps, there’s the War Table bits (a glorified level select and level unlocker sort of thing) you go to in order to plan out your next mission. Kind of. And… fuck, I can’t muster up the words to talk about how much bullshit this war council thing is. I’d rather quote someone who is better at bitching about this thing than I am.
Here is how the game flows: you go to the ‘wartable’ and choose a quest to start. There are three ‘types’ of quests. Main-Story ones, Side-Quests and ‘Missions for Advisers’. The game has well over a 100 quests. But there is a big problem here. Let me explain. This is a long game, it will take you 50-60 hours to beat, however the ACTUAL main story is EXTREMELY short. 9 Quests. That’s right the main story is NINE quests, amounting for no more than 10 hours of playtime. Of course…Bioware can’t have you beating the game in 10 hours so they required you have enough ‘Power Points’ to start a Main story mission…how do you get these power points you ask? by completing side quests of course. A quest can give you 1-3 points. There are other means to obtain points, like closing rifts (basically killing bunch of demons) and collecting shards etc. Some Main Story quests require 40 points…so you HAVE to do tons of side quests whether you like it or not. The majority of the quests are boring as hell, while the ‘companions quests’ offer a tiny bit more story and context. And then we have the third type of quest…the ones where you send your advisers to complete. Let me explain…you have three advisers, one commanding your army, one for secrets/spy network and one for diplomacy. You look at a quest description, and decide which adviser is best suited to complete the quest. Let’s say one of our agents is kidnapped, you choose to let your army commander handle it and he will send soldiers to rescue the agent, or let the diplomacy adviser handle it and she will negotiate the agent’s release. It doesn’t sound bad right? well except for one small detail…these quests require several hours to complete…2-3 is common range but few can require as long as 10-15 hours…and I am talking Real-Time hours…once you ‘send’ your adviser to complete a quest you ACTUALLY have to wait several hours for it to complete. With hundred of quests of this kind, you can only do 3-4 a day. Isn’t that just freaking brilliant?. At least DA: Origins gave us the choice to do side quests or focus on the main story. But Origins didn’t have such an embarrassingly short main story that Bioware felt the need to come up with such schemes to ‘hide’ the fact.
That’s right, REAL TIME. Not in-game time where it would encourage you to do side quests just to kill time so your advisors could complete these side missions. I mean, I couldn’t believe it when I figured this out: you can start a side mission, save the game, shut the system off, come back to it several hours later, and the missions would all be complete, and you can assign these advisors to other missions. This is a bullshit system that reminds me too much of micro-transactions, and it’s taken to ridiculous lengths that break immersion like those dumbass free-to-play facebook/mobile games. And even all that aside, since I don’t feel I’ve stressed this enough, the side missions are fucking boring. Whether you’re doing them with actual third-person gameplay, or your advisors are doing them off-screen.
Plus the missions are practically inconsequential outside of gaining XP. They don’t have an effect on the story. At best they have an affect on your relationship levels with other characters (which ends up being another form of XP, more or less), none of which I gave a shit about (felt I had to mention that again).
Because of this, the pacing of the game sucks ass. It comes off as a glorified grind-fest half the time to make up for the fact that their shitty story is too short because they got shitty writers who care more about inserting SJW bullshit rather than content loaded with great lore. And it wasn’t worth playing to the end, not even when I shelled out the extra non-refundable cash to get to the extended DLC end. Fuck this game. The only thing this game accomplished was wanting to give Dragon Age: Origins a second shot. While the “pause to do this” mechanism can prevent things from running smoothly, at least it keeps you on your toes and thinking on how to best approach a combat scenario, thinking tactically, how to line up your characters, how to get good with the party, and use the environment to your advantage, among other factors. Plus the story and side quests and characters were far more interesting (and less black/bi/fag/pussy/dick-washed). I’ll take that over the bland monotonous streamlined gameplay this provides.
AS a female gamer, I think I can say this level of political correctness is costing BOTH genders. I mean LOOK at these ugly things, their faces are like melting fucking potatoes! They are UNCANNY LOOKING. I would appreciate them simply trying to avoid making ultra-sexualized girls, cause sometimes they can be a bit annoying… But Jesus Christ given the choice between the two, I’d choose tits galore, cause at least it isn’t… this.
The Anomalous Host 