Finally and Truly Awake

FINALLY!

I finished Dragon Age: Origins - Awakenings. I thought that DLC would never bloody end. I understand that it was made as a lead in to Dragon Age II but it honestly did not need to take me a week to get through it. The ME2 pre-cursory DLC to ME3, The Arrival, took me about a day to get through and that was honestly much more satisfying and appealing than playing through Awakenings.

I'm pretty happy to finally be able to cross off DA:O from my personal play list but find myself disappointed in the overall game experience. The story was a bit simplified and I never really found myself caring too much for any of the characters. I found that when they disapproved of an action of mine I was more disappointed not because the character was disapproving but because I knew I had to work to get that rating back up just so they wouldn't leave me in the final battle.

As opposed to the Mass Effect series, where I would try my best to do everything possible for my team and crew so that they would be at their best near the end of each game not only because it was necessary, but because I really did feel a connection to those characters. I felt I owed it to them.

Some slight spoilery stuff ahoy.



From the first installment of the Mass Effect series, I felt a connection to nearly every character I encountered, especially my Shepard. I sympathized with Kaidan's back-story. I loved Garrus' no-holds-barred attitude, his need to get the job done by almost any means necessary. Tali's love of machinery and inquisitiveness about life outside the Flotilla. Wrex's entire persona was wonderful to be around. He was just so joyously violent I couldn't help but love the guy. Joker's slightly off-color remarks and his overall attitude despite his brittle-bone disease and years of taking crap from people because of it, he's one of the strongest characters in his own right.

Even the characters I didn't really care that much for in the first one meant something to me. Liara seemed extremely bland as a character to me, but her information on the Protheans and on her own mother were valuable assets. She was useful and important to the mission. She was also an extremely understanding sort of Asari (I'm not sure how to explain the use of the name of her race in favor of using the term "person", for me a person is someone who is human, not alien.) and ended up being a fairly good friend to my Shepard.

Even Ashley, who was a racist bitch, I cared about. She was on my crew and as such was my responsibility, supposedly she evolved into a more understanding person when it came to the aliens on board the ship but either I didn't see that or I simply did not engage in as much conversations with her as I should have, but I digress. During the mission on Virmire, the first time I was confronted with the decision of who to save, I had to put down the controller for a full 20 minutes while I decided what the hell I was going to do. Not because I cared terribly for Ashley as a person, but because she was a part of my crew. I didn't want to have to sacrifice one of my own crew members for the safety of the mission, I wanted to be able to save them both but I couldn't and I knew that. Ultimately, I ended up saving Kaidan.

Hell, I even enjoyed Doctor Chakwas and Navigator Pressly and they weren't even people on the crew who I could take with me on missions. They were tertiary characters who generally had more personality than most of the characters in DA:O.

It was that sort of connection to the characters I had to rely on that was missing for me in DA:O. Most of the characters seemed extremely one-dimensional. They were defined by their class alone so their personalities came only secondary to that.

The story was also pretty basic. Giant, not completely understood and fairly simple minded mass of evil is invading the land one again, as it did centuries ago, that must be stopped yet again by a special class of warrior.

It did not help matters much that the game was pretty buggy for me. Characters would become stuck in one place and then suddenly appear right next to me as if they had been there the whole time, cut scenes would turn black as if the game had shut itself down only to re-appear once the dialogue options showed up and I chose one. The constant crashing of the game itself was not fun for me either, especially when it always happened during crucial battles in the game. And before you even attempt to tell me that it wasn't an issue with the game, it was my hardware, the entire Mass Effect series played just fine on La Beba (the PC I am using) with the exception of one or two graphics bugs that many people encountered in the games, and so does every other game I run or have run on this computer.

So, to sum up, I found the story lacking, most of the characters one-dimensional even though they could be entertaining and had one too many technical issues with the game that caused my entire game experience to drag on for longer than needed.

Perhaps if I had chosen one of the other Origin stories instead of the City Elf to complete the game with, I may have been more satisfied with it, but I'm certainly not about to find that out any time soon. Which is another issue I am having with the game, if the Origin story that should have been one of the more controversial main characters to play as (in my opinion, given that Elves in this world are treated just a bit better than slaves, and not by much) was that boring for me, how could playing as any other character race be more fulfilling?

Cheers.