Forum Overview :: Dragon Age 2 :: Story bitches *SPOILERS*

[quote name="Worm"]The game gets pretty weak in motivation fast. The most compelling task put before you is get 50 gold pieces, after that it's all down hill. Did you wish the first game was more about the retarded qunari and the interplay between mage and templar? Well that's basically all the second game is about. Some interesting things like Flemeth are shoehorned so you don't mistake this game for something COMPLETELY generic. I guess I'll bitch about the chapters in order. Prologue: The city is full and you have to work for a year as a thief or <s>murderer</s> mercenary to be given admittance. This is all covered in a cutscene and you're never given an impression of what you did for that year and only really figure out through NPCs telling you about it. <b>Chapter 1, get 50 gold, go on expedition.</b> This is probably my favorite chapter. You need money essentially because you deserve it and to hide your mage sister from the mage police. I don't need motivation in an RPG to get gold, but this would have been a good time to showcase your mother begging on the street so she didn't starve or show your sister giving magical handjobs for coin, or anything to sympathize you with the plight of being a poor refugee. Though there is nothing, Bioware's vision of poverty is basically the same as being rich, except your things are dirty. Your uncle, who spent all your mother's inheritance, somehow stoically keeps you fed and housed and still is painted as a villain for taking the inheritance in the first place rather than being poor until you all showed up. One quest is tracking a murderer, more on that later. Before you go on the expedition you have an option of taking your sister or not. Essentially this is a false choice, because you lose the NPC anyway. If you don't bring her the mage police come and take her away, if you do bring her she gets infected and dies if you don't have another NPC in your group, if you have that NPC with you she leaves to join the Grey Wardens. This is a lame grab for sympathy that easily could have been gotten during the prologue or realistically displaying the plight of a poor refugee. The same thing happens to your brother except he becomes a mage cop instead of being taken into mage prison by the mage cops, the sibling character might as well not be in the game. During the expedition you find some generic cursed idol which sets your expedition leader against you, it's not a big deal because it lets you find awesome treasure. <b>Chapter 2, now you're a rich adventurer and you no longer have a dirty house.</b> You get some neat companion quests and the major thing about this chapter are the Qunari. From the very beginning of the game you're told over and over again that the Qunari were stranded in the city and are so bad ass and awesome that they were given a place to live without asking. Apparently a boat of them got stranded, this makes them the most dangerous thing in the city somehow, even though it's only one boatload of guys. So this boatload of demon people are basically given their own part of the city because they are so bad ass, and you need to help them with minor problems, again because they're so bad ass and mysterious. Each time you help their leader bores you with philosophical fatalist drivel that makes you want to kill him. However in the meantime (I might have this in the wrong chapter) your mother goes missing and HAS HER HEAD CUT OFF TO COMPLETE AN EVIL MAGE'S (named Quentin :( ) ZOMBIE SEX DOLL RECREATION OF HIS DEAD WIFE. Again a bullshit sympathy grab. Later you find that Isabella stole their special artifact, and since they're all autistic giant monsters they can't leave without it. Of course Isabella needs the relic because without the relic she'll be killed by this guy (who hasn't been able to kill her over the span of like 4 years). If you make the sane choice and say "that relic will prevent a war we have to give it back" she disappears forever and you can't stop it. Apparently you have to say she can go sell the priceless relic for 20 gold pieces and THEN betray her, because that was how the railroad tracks were laid by Bioware's genius designers. More false choices and you probably still have to fight the retarded Qunari even if you give them the relic because WE GOTTA HAVE A BOSS FIGHT and blah blah blah HONOR DEMANDS IT. Also during the final fight you're introduced to the leader of the evil mage cops and the leader of the poor mages. Also during this the basically ineffectual leader is killed by the Qunari. <b>Chapter 3, now you're the Champion of the city because you slaughtered a bunch of boring monster people that no one thought to slaughter for 4 years.</b> So at the start of this chapter, it mentions you were made champion, and that the leader of the mage cops is now the leader of the city and has been cracking down on mages for THREE YEARS. Again we're not shown anything to create sympathy or given a feel that things are really happen, the game just cuts to a cutscene that sets up the chapter because no one at Bioware can write. You just sit statically for 3 years I guess while mages are lobotomized. After that you have some dumb quests about mages and end up at the final confrontation. Basically one of your companions blows up the church where the leader of the mages and mage police is, so the mage police are going to kill every mage. Now you've gotta choose mage police or mages. So you pick mages obviously because the leader of the mage police is a crazy bitch but it doesn't even matter. As you're defending yourself from the mage police the mage leader turns himself into a demon as some kind of last resort that we didn't need and attacks everyone. My guys weren't even winded, oh well I guess they animated two bosses so we're gonna fight two bosses whether we like it or not. Not to mention he favorably mentions the evil mage who turned your mother into a fucking necrotic real doll, I mean what the fuck? So after you kill the leader of your own side then you have to go kill the enemy leader (I guess it goes in reverse if you side with the mage police), though guess what what? She has a sword made out of the idol that made your expedition leader go insane, so she's just fucking crazy anyway, and looks like a fucking character from Soul Blade. So you kill her and she turns into a statue or something, and that's the end of the game. Absolutely no explanation of what happened to characters is given, just more stuff about the dumb political shit you don't even care about the game mentions your lover stayed with you, and basically has less words than the ending from Final Fantasy 1.[/quote]