I love both games but it genuinely wounds me that dragon age inquisition is considered a better written game than dragon age 2 in wider gaming circles.
da2 does SO many interesting things, from its very deliberately paced and solid three act structure, its arc as a tragedy, its use of the frame narrative and the metatextual implications of a stated unreliable narrator -- all the questions surrounding how much of what we’re playing is the actual truth or where the narrative is distorted by the storyteller: varric extrapolating from what he does know in situations where he wasn’t present, like the romances, or even him openly admitting that he’s taking liberties because it makes for a better story, you can sometimes deduce he’s protecting someone b/c he’s basically talking to a templar cop lol, every so often he doesn’t actually know what happened but doesn’t believe cassandra will buy that -- or simply out of love, like giving hawke that talk with leandra at the end of the dlc even if she’s dead, because hawke deserves the closure and this is the only way varric knows how to give it to them. it’s a story about stories, and you’re playing as hawke but really you’re playing from varric’s perspective; his stories for making sense of the world. the city and people he loves and, as becomes increasingly clear as you play, his grief at what’s happened to them. it’s a character study of a guy you get to know through his stories in ways he probably wouldn’t let you in person. gameplay wise we have no choice but to engage in what he presents to us as if it’s truth, even when it’s obviously not. and on top of all that it takes the themes of unreliable narrators and how history gets written from all the dragon age games and fucking RUNS with it and it’s just so gooooooooood and interesting I want to cry.
and like... don’t get me wrong, I have played a truly unconscionable number of hours of da:i, and it has great individual character moments and a lot of wonderful stuff. but overall, structurally, it’s just a fucking mess lol
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