Game Review: Dragon Age: Origins

I first started playing Dragon Age: Origins a decade ago, shortly after it first came out. Though I was living in Japan at the time and Steam wouldn't let me buy anything due to the conflict between my billing address and my IP, I asked a friend to gift me a copy because I was so excited about the game. Another CRPG by Bioware, which had made Baldur's Gate II and Neverwinter Nights? The promise that your choices, especially your origin story, would deeply affect how the game played out for you? I had been following news of the game for months and I was so excited to play it that I mostly abandoned playing World of Warcraft and dove into Dragon Age, playing twenty hours in a couple weeks even though I was working fifty hour weeks with a two hour commute at the time.

Then, my hard drive crashed and Steam didn't back up my save.

The famed Japanese customer service returned my laptop good as new, including sending a courier to my house to pack it up in a box to my satisfaction and deliver it back to me when it was fixed, and I had fortunately backed up all my music and documents on schoolpsychnerd's new laptop a month or so before the crash, but twenty hours of Dragon Age: Origins was gone. I was discouraged enough that I just went back to World of Warcraft, where my character was preserved on external servers, and didn't touch Dragon Age for a decade. It took the recent Square Roots Podcast series on Dragon Age: Origins to convince me to take a break from Breath of the Wild and pull me back into the game.

It was fun, but I feel like I would have liked it a lot more if I had played it back when it came out.

The map is literally both grim and dark.

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