I didn't think a video game would have a good take on the gamer situation, but I agree: Gamers are oppressed, and they should be.
I see why this game was slobbered all over by games journalists for its writing. Truly, this is the kind of probing and thoughtful question to be expected of a game that's worthy of a The Game Awards award.
So I spent most of today (it's a stat holiday) basically trying to finish as much of the game as I could, as I'm a bit worn out on it at this point. So far, I've record almost one terabyte of 1440p HEVC video for a future YouTube video.
I'm not quite at the end, but this game definitely...um...goes places with the Dalish elves. Not good places, mind you.
You know, I'm amazed at how cack-handed this series of games is when it comes to their oppression allegories. Dragon Age keeps inadvertently raising thought experiments like, "What if this oppressed minority really SHOULD be oppressed?" or "What if there's something to the demented ravings of genocide deniers?" And maybe it's just me, but I don't think those thought experiments are worth having.
I refer you my earlier comments. It's because they're trying to wrestle the fact that they live in a society which is clearly the historical villain *and* hasn't fundamentally changed. So to try to wrangle with that understand there's a few take aways that you can have:
-Yeah, we did that. It was good, actually and it's fine to use force to keep it that way (fascists)
-It was bad then and its bad now, the entire structure must be upended and replaced. By force if necessary. (Leftists)
-maybe it was bad, but maybe there's one neat trick that makes our unjust system and the force it uses justified (liberals)
And since this is a very *Liberal* game they're trying to wrestle with that last point and make it work in a fictional setting because they have suspicions that that's how the world fundamentally works in real life as well.
Well, the problem is we've never really explored how the justice system works in Thedas. Also, our character is Dalish...so just how *do* the Dalish resolve disputes amongst themselves? Unfortunately, Inquisition isn't really interested in Dalish culture beyond shitting all over it, so we don't get an answer.
So now that we have permission from Svarah Sun-Hair to travel to the island called The Lady's Rest. There we find a Fade rift that allows us to see the memories of Inquisitor Ameridan's lover, Telana, who tells us that Ameridan was sent by the Orlesian Emperor Drakon to fight an Avvar dragon (and not-so-subtle hint about what we're going to face).
We return to Professor Kenric with the news, who says that he may have just made tenure with this information, and that there has been considerable speculation about whether or not this Telana even existed.
There are a lot of sidequests here, most of which aren't worth covering, but basically Svarah won't help us against the Jaws of Hakkon unless their "Hold Beast" returns, a bear named Storvacker who effectively acts their tribe's totem. "Storvacker" sounds like a combination of the Old Norse words störr (meaning "large" or "great") and vakr, meaning "valiant" or "brave."
Along the way, we learn that Avvar mages allow themselves to be possessed by spirits in order to learn from them, and then the spirit departs their body at some point. Predictably, Cassandra gets the vapours about this. "They are abominations!" she says. (Honestly, Cassandra starts becoming less and less sympathetic as the game nears the end, particularly when you take her to the Temple of Mythal, but I'll cover that in time).
Eventually we find their bear, who has been imprisoned by the Hakkonites. He seems fairly chill for a bear:
(Actually one of my...heh...bugbears with RPGs is when bears are shown to be psychotically violent creatures who attack everything on sight. Which isn't how most bears behave in real life.)
After bringing the bear back to the hold, Svarah tells us that, in times of old, the Jaws of Hakkon bound their god to a mortal form (in this case, a dragon) in order to wage war on the lowlands. He was eventually defeated and then somehow vanished, and now the Hakkonites are trying to do the same thing again. Obviously, we have to stop them, but there's one problem: their fortress is surrounded by a wall of ice that cannot be melted.
The trial of Inquisitor Ameridan eventually brings us to the ruins of Tevinter Fortress, which is predictably home to some Hakkonites who aren't terribly happy to see us. And even though the enemies in this area all scale to our level, the Knight-Enchanter is so thoroughly broken that they can't even scratch us.
I assume that the white war paint is supposed to make them look threatening, but instead it just makes them look as if they had accident painting the fence.
To progress, we have to solve a puzzle. Apparently people from Tevinter used needlessly-elaborate locking systems where people had to walk across floor tiles in a certain order:
This is one of those bothersome RPG puzzles that always tempts me to just look up the solution online because they're such a bother (the Pathfinder games were just terrible with these kinds of puzzles).
We come to a shrine that pay reverence to both Andraste and the elven gods, and we can use our Dalish background to fill Professor Kenric in on the details. (The dialogue option appears twice, because one is our character's background and the other is an Inquisition perk).
Just what exactly is that apostrophe in "Ghilan'nain" supposed to represent? I hate it when fantasy writers throw random punctuation into their made up words without ever clarifying what it's supposed to mean.
The way the game handles dialogue as a Dalish Inquisitor is maddeningly inconsistent. Sometimes you get to be knowledgeable about your culture, other times the game has people lecture you about your own culture as though you were ignorant of it.
To melt the ice surrounding the Hakkonites fortress, we have to activate a series of trail markers that lead across the entire Frostback Basin. Once the ice has been destroyed, we can gather the friendly Avvar warriors and mount an assault.
This game just loves glowy green magic stuff.
Inside, there is a "Warmth" mechanic where you will eventually freeze to death unless you stay close to the various campfires scattered about the area. As you make your way through the area, you'll hear the Hakkonites chanting as they attempt to summon their god, and since the Avvar are obvious Viking analogues it's all in alliterative verse:
Eventually we meet the boss of this dungeon: the leader of the Jaws of Hakkon, who is named Gurd Harofsen. All the Avvar have vaguely Scandinavian names, but the name "Gurd" makes me chuckle, since it sounds like "Gerd" which is a feminine Scandinavian name.
You know, I have to wonder...why is it that whenever BioWare writes human cultures in Dragon Age, they invariably turn out to be dull, shallow pastiches of historical cultures? Ferelden is just medieval England (which is boring, since that's been done a hundred times before in fantasy literature) and Orlais is little more than a ridiculous cliche of pre-revolutionary France, to the point where I can easily imagine an actual French person looking at them and cringing so hard that it squeezes their eyeballs out of their sockets.
It's the non-human cultures - the dwarves, the elves, the qunari - that are the interesting ones, since they're not obvious copies of real-world cultures, but as I've said before, the game relentlessly shits on those cultures and suggests that the best course of action is to get away from them as quickly as possible. Varric is "not a typical dwarf," Sera is "not a typical elf," and Iron Bull is "not a typical qunari," and in each case these characters are portrayed sympathetically. (You might argue that Sera is not all sympathetically portrayed, but there will be certain revelations later that change that).
Getting back to the game, Gurd can be a tough fight, since you have to stay close to the campfires to stay warm, and throughout the battle Gurd will continually extinguish them. He has an annoying grapple attack where he'll send an icy claw to crapple a character and then teleport towards them. Fortunately, the Knight-Enchanter's Fade Cloak ability can negate this entirely.
Once Gurd is dead, we find that Inquisitor Ameridan is not only still alive, but a Dalish elf atop of that:
"I'm afraid, Inquisitor, that the humans screwed us over. In my clan, we call that "Tuesday." Or any day that ends in 'y' for that matter."
Ameridan was a close friend of Emperor Drakon, and we give him the bad news: That Drakon's son, Kordillus the Second, betrayed the elves and destroyed the Dales.
Cassandra wonders how the leader of the Seekers could also be a mage, and Ameridan responds that, while most of the members of the Inquisition were Seekers, they did not turn away the aid of mages. Since we've done Cassandra's personal quest, we can tell Ameridan about reversing the Rite of Tranquility, and he laments how it's become a tool of repression.
Unfortunately, we can't stay to chat for very long. The dragon hovering over us carries the spirit of Hakkon Wintersbreath, which the Hakkonites have been trying to free. Unfortunately, that means that Ameridan's bindings have been disrupted, which in turn causes the passage of years to instantly catch up with him. He crumbles into dust, and worse, we now have a dragon on the loose. No problem, right? I mean we've already killed TEN GODDAMN HIGH DRAGONS ALREADY!!!
Scattered across the basin are Ameridan's memories, which can shed light on the events of his time. In one of them, he laments that the elves of the Dales mistrusted the Orlesians, as they were violent expansionists who forced their religion on conquered peoples, and hoped that they would stand with them in their battle against the darkspawn. But the elves ignored the Second Blight, and the game all but says this led to the fall of the Dales.
"Drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not."
Yes, that's right, they actually went there. "You are responsible for your own oppression, LOL."
I'm going to try to be generous to BioWare and assume that what they were trying to say is that people ought to put aside their differences and unite against an existential threat. But recent events have made me much less charitable towards this interpretation. It's been a year since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and you wouldn't how many times I've heard, often from self-proclaimed leftists, that Ukraine is somehow responsible for being invaded. Reasons vary from things like "NATO expansion!" or "Ukraine has Nazis!" (which is a ludicrous claim, considering that many countries have a far-right problem, and Ukraine isn't even the worst in this regard), and a constant refrain is that the destruction visited upon Ukraine by the Russian military is somehow Ukraine's fault because they won't negotiate with Russia.
And I always want to ask, "Motherfucker, who started this war? Who could end this war at any moment by withdrawing all troops from occupied territory, including Crimea? Not Ukraine, that's for sure!"
So yes, it sucks that the elves of the Dales didn't help the Orlesians with the darkspawn, but the humans still chose to attack them, and for that the blame rests entirely on them.
It really is amazing the lengths to which these games go to "BOTH SIDES!!!" conflicts. It's like the writers got into their head that "Black and white morality bad! Morally grey good!" and then proceeded to force every single conflict into that mould regardless of how little sense it made.
Anyway, we fight Hakkon Wintersbreath on a frozen patch of water, and he's fought much like any other dragon in the game. And because the Knight-Enchanter class is so OP, the fight is incredibly easy.
Once he's been dealt with, we return to Svarah Sun-Hair, and there's an amusing bit where we get to "judge" Storvacker since he failed in his duty by allowing himself to be captured. Naturally, this allows us to make some terrible bear-related puns:
"Storvacker heard these words, raised his head, and thought of nothing. Because he is a bear."
So thus ends the Jaws of Hakkon DLC. I have to say that it's probably the weaker of the two pieces of DLC we've played thus far (no Solid Snake dwarf, for one thing), and that the character of Ameridan was criminally underused (he literally pops up, says a few lines, and then dies).
Back in Skyhold, we sell off all the loot we've collected (which is STILL worse than anything I've crafted), and then have a talk with Varric, which leads to a scene of the party playing cards:
All I can say is that these coins are HUGE. Carrying any amount of money around must be incredibly awkward.
The game is called Wicked Grace, and from what I can tell it's basically just poker. Or should I say strip poker, because there's a smash cut to Cullen winding up completely naked:
Yes, it's obvious fanservice for the Cullen fangirl brigade, but whatever. There are far worse things to criticise in this game, which we'll see in the next few entries.
It really is amazing the lengths to which these games go to "BOTH SIDES!!!" conflicts. It's like the writers got into their head that "Black and white morality bad! Morally grey good!" and then proceeded to force every single conflict into that mould regardless of how little sense it made.
Something I found really telling was that David Gaider made a comment somewhere that he regretted having Meredith be driven crazy by the lyrium idol in DA2 because it made siding with the Templars seem like an invalid choice. Which is just so revealing, because it confirms that the writers actually want to make siding with the genocidal theocrats be a valid choice. It's also kind of darkly hilarious to me, because I definitely think that placing so much focus on the idol was a mistake- but it's a mistake because it allows the audience to write off the templar's atrocities as the result of arbitrary mystical influence and not an inevitable consequence of the Chantry's persecution of mages.
'look, on one side you have a genocidal racist fascist slaving autocracy that rules half the known world. on the other side you have a bunch of slightly up-themselves elves who just want to be left alone. but the elves sometimes shoot the fascist enforcers of the slave-state, so who're the real bad guys here, huh? makes you think.' - Bioware writers, apparently.
I mean, being able to pick the obviously evil option is often an option in RPGs. It's just that Bioware, instead of running good/evil, they run on Reasonable person/Complete arsehole.
So having an option to take the arsehole option isn't unsurprising. It's just Bioware don't seem to understand where the line is drawn anymore.
Nah, the problem is that Bioware keep trying to make the two choices equivalent. If they had an evil choice that was clearly an evil choice, everyone knew it was an evil choice, and they never tried to pretend it wasn't the evil choice, it would be one thing; we don't get that in the Dragon Age games. They keep trying to tell us that the Chantry and the Templars - who are, again, autocratic fascist murdering raping torturing slavers, just off the back of the Circle system, to say nothing of all their other failings - are exactly equivalent, morally, to the enslaved tortured murdered raped people who are fighting back against them. Hell, it often tries to pain the Templars as the good guys, over those wicked mages who just want to be left alone but keep being relentlessly hounded by the slave-keeping rapist murderers until they have no choice but to turn to things forbidden just to keep their friends safe definitely turn into abominations with zero prompting, no sir.
And then DAI goes and shows that Templars are, in fact, literally worse than useless, as you can make mages completely immune to possession through a pretty simple process that both the Avvar and the Seekers can do reliably and repeatedly. And it still tries to sell the mage cops as the good guys!
With the Jaws of Hakkon DLC finished, it's time to move on to the endgame!
We need to stop Corypheus from finding the Eluvian in the Arbor Wilds, which is one of the best-looking areas in the game:
"We're off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz!"
At times the game's aesthetics remind me of the old Technicolor three-strip process, where filmmakers would use a special camera that would expose three separate film strips at once - one for red, one for green, and one for blue - and then combine them with something called the dye transfer process. The result is incredibly rich and heavily saturated colours, perhaps best seen in the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz.
Anyway, this area is basically just a linear fight through Red Templars, but along the way one of our party members points out that there are elves in the mix:
Of course, I didn't even notice it because this game makes it REALLY hard to get a good look at what you're fighting on account of the extremely over-the-top spell effects and general visual clutter of most scenes.
Eventually we reach the Temple of Mythal, and there's a great bit where you can see the end of the tunnel illuminated in the darkness:
Inside we find our Corypheus and our old friend Samson as he battles with some elves who look Dalish (but quite clearly aren't). And for whatever reason, my first reaction upon seeing Samson was "ROB SCHNEIDER? NOOOO!!!!"
(Once again, it's difficult to convey in screenhots, the animation here is appalling, running at what looks like a single-digit framerate).
Corypheus mentions something about the "Well of Sorrows," but when he tries to kill one of the elven guardians a pair of statues near the bridge zap him with magical energy, which causes the flesh to melt off his bones like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark:
Man, this villain is such a chump it's not even funny. If you're doing an epic, save-the-world story, then you NEED a compelling villain, and this game does not deliver.
Before we can celebrate, however, Corypheus begins taking control of one of the dead Grey Wardens:
"ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL"
The rest of the party flees into the Temple of Mythal, and the doors seal behind them. Cassandra asks Morrigan what the "Well of Sorrows" could be, and Morrigan acts evasive and says that she is uncertain. With some prodding, we can get her to admit that she was wrong:
Like blowing up the Collector base in Mass Effect 2, this feels like one of the rare moments when you can spite the writers' pet character.
Inside, we come across some ancient writings, which results in Morrigan continuing to humansplain elven culture to an elven Inquisitor. There's a puzzle where you have to walk across a series of floor tiles, which light up as you touch them, and the goal is to avoid stepping on the same tile twice. I'm pretty sure I saw the same puzzle in Super Mario Galaxy.
Meanwhile, Cassandra continues to get the vapours about appeasing elven gods, and I really wish there was a a dialogue option where you could paraphrase Tecumseh and tell her "Well, Cassandra, when Andraste came to the world, you killed her, the bride of your Maker, you burned her up! And only after you killed her did you worship her, and start killing those who would not worship her. What kind of a people is this for us to trust?"
Inside, there's a statue of Fen'harel, the Dread Wolf, which is a bit to see here considering that in Dalish legend the Dread Wolf tricked the gods into sealing themselves away in the Beyond (that is, the Dalish term for the Fade). And once again, all of this information comes from Morrigan even though a Dalish Inquisitor would KNOW all this and people usually get REALLY ANNOYED when you lecture them on their OWN CULTURE.
And it continues:
"I'll dominate you if you don't shut up. Wait, that came out wrong."
Soon enough we catch up with Samson, who sics his minions on us. Once they're dead, there's another cutscene where Morrigan insists that we ignore Samson for the moment and find this "Well of Sorrows." Her justification is that humanity has crushed so many wondrous things (elves, dragons, magic) under their boot, and that if they don't work to preserve all this then they will be left with nothing but mundanity.
"I don't know, Morrigan, this sounds like something you should be taking up with modern fantasy writers, not me."
This conversation feels odd, because:
- The Dalish HAVE been trying to reclaim their culture and history, and the game keeps portraying this as stupid, foolish, and wrong.
- Morrigan suggests that it's humans who are responsible for all this destruction, but the games keep portraying non-human cultures as completely dysfunctional or depraved. As in, I somehow doubt the qunari are going to be terribly respectful or tolerant of local culture in the regions they conquered.
- Dragon Age is heavily inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire, a very post-modern series of novels which were all about de-mythologising and mundane-ifying fantasy.
As a further annoyance, there's a point where you can come across a mosaic of Andruil, the elven goddess of the hunt, and when you interact with it the Inquisitor says "What's this?" and then Morrigan explains it to her...even though she's a DALISH ELF and WOULD ALREADY KNOW THIS!!!
We have to do a few more tile puzzles before the Well of Sorrows can be accessed. Once inside the inner sanctum, we come across an elf named Abelas, who is part of an ancient group of elven sentinels who have been standing guard over this place for centuries. They enter a state of dormancy ("Uthenera"), awakening only to defend the Temple of Mythal.
This sounds like a wonderful source of information about ancient elven culture, but if you try to point out that elves of the present day "have lost everything" and that they could learn so much from him, he basically tells you to go fuck yourself:
"Dude, we've got matching tats! Just chill, all right?"
Anyway, Abelas doesn't want us to mess with the Well of Sorrows. We agree that we shouldn't fuck around and find out with something we know little about, at which point Morrigan throws a fit and transforms into a bird, hell bent on using the well:
That's just what this place needs...more bird poop all over everything:
Naturally, we have to pursue her, and along the way Cassandra makes a rather awful comment:
"Well, Cassandra, why do you humans pour so much effort in worshipping a god that hates you?"
Of course, you are unable to respond to this.
It turns out Samson has reached the well ahead of us, and he brags about how his armour makes him invulnerable. But just like the biblical Samson, we have a way of undoing that invulnerability:
"My soul...remains guarded!" *head rip*
After a brief fight, we can actually take him prisoner for later judging. Well THAT should be interesting, at least.
Meanwhile, Abelas is pursuing Morrigan to the Well of Sorrows, which leads to a rather lengthy cutscene where Abelas explains that, at the end of their lives, the servants of Mythal was pass their knowledge on through the well. He does acknowledge that our cause is righteous, however, but warns us that whoever drinks from the Well of Sorrows will be bound to the will of Mythal forever.
So like, wouldn't it be it...heh heh...really funny if, like, Mythal were still alive and someone whose will you REALLY didn't want to be bound to?
Morrigan is dismissive, saying that Mythal is long gone, having been betrayed by the Dread Wolf according to elven legend, and Abelas sneeringly says that "elven legend" is wrong. The Dread Wolf had nothing to do with her demise, and says that she was murdered by those who destroyed her temple.
So now we have a choice - do we drink from the well ourselves, or let Morrigan do it?
Morrigan pridefully declares that she is the best person to use the well's knowledge in the service of the Inquisition, and considering that this quest is called "What Pride Had Wrought" it seems to me like drinking from the well MIGHT be a bad idea. So of COURSE we let Morrigan drink from it, and our party members are in full agreement:
Varric just chilling in the background, no longer fazed by any of the crazy shit that keeps happening.
Morrigan survives the process, but then Corypheus shows up and throws a hissy fit about the fact we got here first. And I do mean "hissy fit" because he pounds his fists on the railing like an angry child:
It's seriously difficult to overstate how pathetic this guy is.
Our party flees through a nearby Eluvian, and suddenly a strange nude figure emerges from the well to stop him:
His "DA FUQ???" expression will never not be hilarious.
It's weird. I love Morrigan as a character. I even think what happens if you give her the Well of Sorrows is kinda dope (she sought the power to escape her abusive mother at any cost and is now kinda unable to ever get away from her, oof, tragic, I love how awful it is). She is one of my favourites, and unlike Liara (also a fave), I don't think she's super favoured by the writers - far too much shit goes sideways for her for me to say that (see above).
But how she's done in this quest, fuuuck. It's so bad. It's inexcusably bad for you being Dalish to barely matter here (yeah, I know Bioware used 'Bioware magic' to make this game in a year, and even having people other than 'human' was a last minute decision; even fucking so). It's inexcusably bad to have someone who isn't even elven get this ancient elven thing. It's inexcusably bad for the ancient elves to hate the Dalish. It's all so shit. It's not like some of the other quests where you can tweak a few things to make it okay (like, deleting the 'maybe it was the Dales' fault the Exalted March happened' line from Jaws of Hakkon makes it ten times better almost immediately), it's just screwy from start to finish.
Yeah, Dragon Age just... really does not respect non-humans at all. It especially hates elves; I think this is in part because of Dragon Age's 00s dedication to being a brown lifeless hole lacking anything interesting. Not that elves are normally interesting, because they're normally dull as dishwater, but they are at least respected by their writers.
Also Abelas is a dude who's literally called 'Apologies'. Or 'Sorry', I suppose. (Okay fine 'Ir abelas' supposedly literally translates to 'I sorrow' so he's called 'Sorrow' and so he's named after the place haha isn't it funny but also lol the dude's called 'Apologies'.)
Yeah, Dragon Age just... really does not respect non-humans at all. It especially hates elves; I think this is in part because of Dragon Age's 00s dedication to being a brown lifeless hole lacking anything interesting. Not that elves are normally interesting, because they're normally dull as dishwater, but they are at least respected by their writers.
Also Abelas is a dude who's literally called 'Apologies'. Or 'Sorry', I suppose. (Okay fine 'Ir abelas' supposedly literally translates to 'I sorrow' so he's called 'Sorrow' and so he's named after the place haha isn't it funny but also lol the dude's called 'Apologies'.)
The asari are the elves of the setting: the beautiful, effeminate (well, technically genderless but female-presenting), long-lived, magically-gifted species that often have a superior attitude that rubs others the wrong way. And in the third game, there's a brain-meltingly stupid revelation near the end that effectively demolishes the asari's supposed superiority. The whole thing is filled with logical holes and brazen ass pulls, and what's worse, it was completely unnecessary to get the story where it needed to go. So why did the writer do it? My guess is that the writer was utterly incensed by the possibility that humans weren't the greatest people in the universe, and the asari were the easiest target to tear down. I mean, consider just how human-centric ME3 is: The one new character, James Vega, is a human. A large portion of the story is devoted to the Virmire Survivor, who is a human. The villains (TIM, Kai Leng, Udina) are all humans. The game ends with a fight for Earth, the human homeworld. Cerberus is involved in nearly every aspect of the plot, and they are comprised entirely of humans. The Catalyst takes the form of a human child. Humans drive the entire plot, and the aliens are just spectators.
You see the same thing with elves in Dragon Age. Or in Skyrim. Or the Eldar in WH40k. Or the Vulcans in Enterprise (except that show was so badly written it actually made the Vulcans correct, even if they were jerks about it). Or those weird fans of Quaritch in Avatar. The message seems to be, "No one gets to be supremacist except us homo sapiens, damn it!"
Look, I get it. This whole "Humanity, fuck yeah!" routine was a response to countless sci-fi stories where aliens were vastly more powerful than humanity and often saw fit to lecture mankind on its failings. Admit it...when Q put humanity in trail in TNG and called us a "savage, child race" a part of you probably wanted to see him get his ass kicked. But there's a part where it stops being cathartic and starts being more than a bit chauvinistic.
Before we take on Corypheus, there is one last task for us to do. Talking to Leliana reveals that she recevied a letter from Divine Justinia, written some time in the past that was to be delivered to Leliana in the event she died. According to the letter, she is to go a small village called Valence, where something is hidden, evidently. There is a small chantry there where Justinia was a Revered Mother, and Leliana assumes that whatever is stashed there must be important.
I know the developers had limited time to create art assets, but I find it odd that Leliana wears this spymaster hood AT ALL TIMES.
Before we do that, we go and speak with Sera. You see, I have a habit of doing things like randomly jabbing a fork into my eye, so this is sort of like that.
SHUT THE FUCK UP SHUT THE FUCK UP SHUT THE FUCK UP SHUT THE FUCK UP...
Sera goes into rant mode, declaring that the elven gods are just demons. When we point out that this is just a bit offensive, her reasoning is that the elven gods and the Maker can't co-exist, and she'd prefer to believe the stuff "not made up by dead people who failed."
YOUR HOME CITY OF DENERIM GOT TRASHED BY AN OLD GOD OF TEVINTER, YOU STUPID TWAT.
NO. NO IT DOES NOT.
She suggests that the only reason we might NOT agree that the elven gods were demons is "because Abelas looked weird," and by following that logic "Coryphy-shitheel" must be "full of lumpy truth."
Like, holy fucking shit is this character bad. Just all around rotten. I thought Qara from Neverwinter Nights 2 was one of the worst party members ever seen in an RPG, but Inquisition has torn it down from it's throne! I feel like this game is deliberately trolling me with this character.
With that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, we head off to Valence, except that, due to a bug, I can't actually click on the map icon in Skyhold. Instead, I have to go to another area and THEN it works, for some reason.
I wonder who the statue of the guy facepalming is supposed to represent.
Inside the chantry we meet an old friend of Leliana's named Sister Natalie. There are three secret switches we need to find, hinted at by some cryptic references in Justinia's letter. Of course, we don't have to actually figure anything out since we can find the secret switches by using our Witcher Inquisitor Sense.
After hitting all three switches, a secret door opens up, and then Leliana reveals that Natalie is lying to her. More specifically, that she is working for someone called Grand Cleric Victoire, who opposed Justinia. Evidently she is making a move to be the new Divine, and more importantly, she regards the Inquisition as an enemy.
Food $200, Data $150, Rent $800, Candles $3,600, Utility $150. Someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. My family is dying.
We can choose to have Leliana kill or spare Natalie, but she winds up killing her regardless. After doing some digging, it turns out that whether she kills him or not is dependent on whether or not she has been hardened, and this in turn depends on the dialogue options you made in several optional conversations going all the way back to the beginning of the game in Haven. Evidently, I either didn't have these conversations or chose the wrong options, so I guess we're going with hardened Leliana for this run.
Inside the hidden compartment, there's just a box with nothing in it. All that's there is a message on the lid that says, "The Left Hand should lay down her burden."
Maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way?
Back in Skyhold, Leliana more or less decides that, from now on, she's going to be engaging in some ruthless, Crusader Kings-type shit.
With that out of the way, we can get back to the endgame. Morrigan wanted to speak to us by the Eluvian, but when we enter the room Leliana runs up to us and says that Morrigan's son entered the mirror and that she went in after them. But when we go through the Eluvian, we discover that it now leads to the Fade, not the Crossroads, and we find Morrigan searching in vain for her son:
No, I don't know why everyone is drenched in moisture in this scene. Does it rain a lot in the Fade?
The conversation is actually rather jarring, as Morrigan sounds genuinely distraught as opposed to her usual arrogant self. Well, she's going to be even MORE distraught shortly, because we soon find Kieran talking to...
CAPTAIN JANEWAY!!!
"But nothing warms like the heart like a fresh cup of coffee! Speaking of which...CHAKOTAY! WHERE THE HELL DID YOU GET TO???"
Remember how, when Morrigan drank from the well, Abelas warned her that doing so would cause her to be bound to the will of Mythal for all eternity? Well...Mythal is, in fact, still alive, and she just so happens to be Flemeth.
As Varric might say, "Well...shit."
I must admit this is a good twist in Morrigan's character arc (such as it is). She arrogantly thought she could fuck around with an artefact of another culture, assuming that there would be no consequences, and now she's bound to the will of the one person she despises most. Man, being bound to Janeway forever is going to suck. Just imagine, an eternity of fetching coffee from the replicators and cleaning up Neelix's trash in the mess hall...
Of course, Flemeth isn't "entirely" Mythal. She was once a woman who sought revenge, and one day a "wisp of an ancient being" came to her and granted her all she wanted. Since then she's carried her essence with her, "seeking the justice denied to her."
There's a lot of cryptic, portentous stuff in this conversation that will probably make more sense when Dread Wolf comes out. But Morrigan fears that Flemeth just wants to possess her son in order to extend her life, and she pleads with Flemeth to possess her instead, but it turns out that all Flemeth really wants is the soul of the old god inside Kieran, and that Morrigan was never in any danger from her.
So now that that business is out of the way, we can FINALLY get to the final boss fight. We summon the war council to decide how to find Corypheus, but an ominous green glow soon makes it clear that Corypheus has found us:
Wait...could he have done this at any time he wanted? Why did he wait until now to attack us?
The scene then cuts to some ruins in the Valley of the Sacred Ashes, where Corypheus is throwing about some hapless soldiers in a last-ditch attempt to actually appear threatening, all the while proclaiming that non-existence of the Maker:
"At this moment I am euphoric. Not because of any phony Maker's blessing, but because I am enlightened by my own intelligence."
"Bow down before your new god!" he says, to which one of the soldiers cries, "Never!" Corypheus then says "As you wish," before killing him, and reminding me of The Princess Bride isn't doing anything to make this game's villain any more intimidating.
There's a dramatic cutscene of Corypheus lifting the ruins into the sky, and then the battle begins. He taunts Silevil, saying that she is "wearing slave marking on her face with pride." Slave markings, you say? I smell some unfortunate implications in the air! As you can probably guess, Corypheus can't put up much of a fight, and once we take off about a third of his hitpoints he sics his dragon on us. But then, out of nowhere, ANOTHER dragon comes along to fight it mid-air:
"She don't take no prisoners, she gonna give me the business, got a dragon on my back, hey it's a dragon attack..."
Uh, what? When the hell did we get a goddamned DRAGON?
It turns it's actually Morrigan, who has somehow obtained the ability to shapeshift into a draconic form. Now, this isn't ENTIRELY out of left field, since Morrigan had the Shapeshifter specialisation in Origins, and it's possible she's advanced in her skills since then, but this does feel a bit unearned. And if isn't obvious by now, this section was very clearly rushed. I imagine the employees at BioWare were crunching like mad trying to get this game out the door, and they were probably burned out on the whole thing by the end. Which is why game devs ought to unionise, but that's for another topic.
Note that the quest log still says "Take down the Archdemon" even though we've already established that it's not an Archdemon.
The dragon isn't any harder than the other dragon fights, and while I can't capture it in screenshots there's a brief moment where it disappears after it dies and then instantly reappears in the location needed for its death scene.
So now that his dragon is dead, Corypheus can been slain for good, and the final fight is downright pathetic. Corypheus doesn't seem to have any remarkable abilities except to teleport about the battlefield, for all the good it does him. It takes me about a minute to kill him, and before he dies he pleads with the Tevinter gods to save him (and naturally, they do not answer).
All that's needed are some health bars, a timer, and the words "FINISH HIM" in bright red letters.
Silevil use the anchor to tear the orb from his grasp, and then send his sorry arse back to the Fade. And that's it! We've won! Unfortunately, the orb is now broken and Solas is sad:
And no, we can't just glue it back together. Still, Solas informs us that, no matter what happens, we will always have his respect, so there's that, I guess.
So Corypheus is defeated, the Breach is closed, and that's twice that a Dalish elf has stepped forward to save the world (so these filthy humans better be grateful, damn it). There are some victory celebrations back in Skyhold, but oddly enough Solas has gone missing. Ahh...I'm sure this won't be important later!
We then get some Fallout-style ending cards (narrated by Morrigan) that show us how our decisions affected the world:
- Celene remains on her golden throne, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day so that she may never truly die. Wait, wrong golden throne.
- The Grey Wardens continue to rebuild, and there are rumours that they have severed ties with their leaders at Weisshaupt. No one knows what becomes of Loghain, and he *better* show up in Dread Wolf just so we can deny him a chance to sacrifice himself AGAIN.
- Leliana is elected Divine, taking the name Victoria. She institutes some progressive reforms (like ending the Circle of Magi), but is really ruthless about it.
The new fantasy pope is someone that you could potentially have a threesome with. Remember this.
- The rebel mages under Enchanter Fiona form an independent College of Enchanters.
We then roll credits, and at the end there is a stinger where Flemeth walks into the Crossroads to meet with Solas, who is revealed to be the Dread Wolf Fen'Harel (Of course, if you've seen the promotional material for Dread Wolf then this has likely already been spoiled for you). There's some cryptic dialogue from Solas about how "the People" need him, and then he apparently kills (?) Flemeth:
"Chakotay, you treasonous maggot! You'll burn in hell for this!"
This is, however, not the end of the story, as there is still the Trespasser DLC to do, which functions as the actual conclusion to the game (which you had to pay for, back in the day).
I think the idea is that Morrigan gets the dragon-shifting from drinking from the Well Of Sorrows. Flemeth has a dragon-transformation in both DAO and DA2 (and you can kill her when she's a dragon in DAO) and the post hoc implication is, I think, that she has that transformation because of the Mythal thing.
There's some variance in how you get a dragon based on prior-game stuff and who drank from the Well. It can be that it's an actual dragon linked to Mythal instead of Morrigan shapeshifting. And the slave markings thing is something that gets revealed if you romance Solas (and then also in Trespasser I think). In the scene he's actually planning on coming clean about everything with the Inquisitor but chickens out at the last second and offers up the Dalish face tattoo thing as a cover. Also I can't remember which romance you did in this.
Also, personally I actually like the ancient Elven stuff from Inquisition, and especially Trespasser. I find the lost history of it more interesting than the Dalish mythology that just trips the same "just weird old stories" switch in my head as IRL mythologies do. The Dalish getting inadvertently pooed on by being wrong does kinda suck, but I as a player also never expected Dalish mythology to be any more true than IRL mythologies as mentioned.
Human religion is pretty clearly just as wrong as elven religion, but its very telling how the human Fantasy Christian religion being wrong is framed as "but maybe, you never know, we can't say for sure even though every underpinning of it is disproven" while the elven Fantasy Non-Christian religion being wrong is "those naive children, we know better".
There's some variance in how you get a dragon based on prior-game stuff and who drank from the Well. It can be that it's an actual dragon linked to Mythal instead of Morrigan shapeshifting. And the slave markings thing is something that gets revealed if you romance Solas (and then also in Trespasser I think). In the scene he's actually planning on coming clean about everything with the Inquisitor but chickens out at the last second and offers up the Dalish face tattoo thing as a cover. Also I can't remember which romance you did in this.
Also, personally I actually like the ancient Elven stuff from Inquisition, and especially Trespasser. I find the lost history of it more interesting than the Dalish mythology that just trips the same "just weird old stories" switch in my head as IRL mythologies do. The Dalish getting inadvertently pooed on by being wrong does kinda suck, but I as a player also never expected Dalish mythology to be any more true than IRL mythologies as mentioned.
I get what you're saying - and to a certain extent I even agree - but the issue is more that only the non-human cultures and mythologies get revealed as false. Human history gets to be perfectly accurate, or at worst get an 'ooh maybe it's true maybe it isn't' like with the Maker, where the writers explicitly said they'd never confirm or deny Andrastian belief in him (leading to shit like glowing divine lady in the Fade, who's basically just there to go 'unno, IS the PC chosen by the Maker???' and make spooky noises).
I get what you're saying - and to a certain extent I even agree - but the issue is more that only the non-human cultures and mythologies get revealed as false. Human history gets to be perfectly accurate, or at worst get an 'ooh maybe it's true maybe it isn't' like with the Maker, where the writers explicitly said they'd never confirm or deny Andrastian belief in him (leading to shit like glowing divine lady in the Fade, who's basically just there to go 'unno, IS the PC chosen by the Maker???' and make spooky noises).
Exception being Dwarven Religion, which while missing some pieces, still has more evidence for it being correct than the "probably not correct, but we'll never say that because it's Fantasy Christianity so we have to actually respect it" human religion.
And nevertheless gets zero attention, because its Dwarven.
Just what exactly is that apostrophe in "Ghilan'nain" supposed to represent? I hate it when fantasy writers throw random punctuation into their made up words without ever clarifying what it's supposed to mean.
The irony here is that actual real world use cases for the apostrophe are pretty cool IMO. Like how in french you're supposed to merge prepositions with words that start with vowels. A classic example of this being used for a name is D'Artagnan (De + Artagnan) from the Three Musketeers.
One less obvious example I really like comes from the song Ella, elle l'a. Which means 'Ella, she has it'. La + the elle conjunction for avoir equals looping back around to l'a.
I would go hog for any fantasy novel that does the apostrophe thing and then actually justifies it with fictional gramma. I genuinely don't care if that's the only conlang detail they go into. That on it's own would be neat. But both the games industry and fantasy literature are too dominated by monoligual anglo culture to put literally any thought into this stuff.
Maybe Ghilan'nain is something like that. The elven language has some mechanism of mashing words together depending on vowels or something. We'll never know because the writers barely have enough respect for the in-universe cultures they invented to not shit all over them in the story, let alone put thought into their language.
The problem is that, traditionally, an apostrophe can represent several things:
To indicate a letter has been omitted, i.e "it's" versus "it is."
To indicate a syllable break, that is, the apostrophe indicates that the two segments are pronounced separately and do not run together. For example, Arabic mus'haf the apostrophe indicates that it's pronounced "mus haf" and not "mush af"
To indicate a glottal stop, as is usually done when romanizing Arabic
As a transliteration of the Cyrillic soft sign ь
That said, BioWare isn't really interested in creating a full conlang (which, to be fair, would be quite a bit of work for little payoff), and they generally don't really develop their nations' cultures beyond finding some new way to make them dysfunctional.
I'd assume it's to indicate it's pronounced 'Ghilnan nain' instead of 'Ghilnann ain'. But also that's more thought than Bioware has actually put into elven, and there's apstrophes all over it and used inconsistently - see how 'da'len' (child) is apostrophised, but neither 'hahren' (elder) nor 'lethallen' (cousin, in the sense that a lot of languages use it to refer to someone who you aren't related to but who you are vaguely familiar with) are, despite being the same kind of word constructed out of the same root word ('len') with different prefixes.
All right, we're now on to the last stretch of the game, specifically the Trespasser DLC, otherwise known as "Holy Unfortunate Implications, Batman!"
It begins two years after the defeat of Corypheus. The members of the Inquisition are attending an "Exalted Council" at Halamshiral in order to decide the future of the Inquisition. Before that, however, the game gives you an opportunity to catch up with your party members, in scenes that feel very reminiscent of the Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3 (the "We knew our ending was crap, so here's some fanservice" DLC). I won't cover every conversation, but Varric informs us that he has become viscount of Kirkwall and he has an...interesting...present for us:
"Thanks, I hate it."
So Silevil a countess in Kirkwall now. Umm...yay?
On plus side, he also drafted an alliance with the elf-led city council of Wycome, so now Clan Lavellan has some genuine political muscle now. There's also a weird little bit where you can come across paintings that aren't quite level, and when you straighten them up your character gets a Strength bonus (for indulging their OCD, I guess?)
I think the painting on the right is ogling the painting on the left.
Speaking to Cassandra has her acting very...strange. She says something about "following your heart" and then brings up the topic of marriage:
And suddenly I'm a bit concerned that I may have accidentally stumbled into a romance with someone, despite deliberately avoiding such entanglements. It turns out that Varric mentioned a "proposal" (presumably his offer of a noble title) and then somehow Cassandra got into her head that it was a marriage proposal. Weird.
Talking with Vivienne allows us to have a day at the spa, it seems:
I have no idea what is supposed to be going on with her neck here.
Well, the fun has to come to an end some time, so we talk with the Ferelden and Orlesian ambassadors. The Ferelden ambassador is actually Arl Teagan, who is a lot bitchier than he was in Origins:
Do the artists at BioWare have some weird fetish for MASSIVE PAULDRONS or something?
He's upset that the Inquisition is still around and bordering Ferelden territory, despite the fact that the Breach is long gone and Corypheus has been defeated. That said, he DOES have a point - we are occupying a Ferelden castle against the wishes of his government. At the same time, does anyone find it odd that ambassadors in fiction are so often portrayed as huge knobs or extremely abrasive individuals without a hint of tact? I mean, you'd think that being an ambassador is the one job where being a complete ass would be rather detrimental.
Suddenly, the Inquisitor is called away from the meeting by a slight problem - there's a dead Qunari warrior in the Winter Palace, and he seems to have been killed by magic. We follow a trail of blood, which leads to an Eluvian thoughtlessly stashed away in the palace:
Another day, another stolen elven relic stashed away in a human palace...
The mirror takes us to the Crossroads, and Silevil remarks that it's full of colour, while Varric says that everything appears grey. Obviously, this is because elves are the only race in Ferelden capable of seeing octarine.
All I can say is that qunari must have a LOT of blood for this trail to be as long as it is.
There's a blood-red mirror in the middle that we can't use yet, so we take another route, and eventually we come to this elven ruin that is located...um...somewhere:
Some Qunari soldiers have gotten here first, but many of them are dead, and some appear to have been turned to stone. There's an island in a middle of a lake that we need to reach through a series of Eluvians, and along the way we can learn a fair bit about the ancient elves...
...and here is why I have to put on my humourless hat, because what follows is just a bit fucked up.
To summarise, everything that Dalish knew about their ancestors is wrong. Specifically:
- Their gods aren't really gods, just extremely powerful mages called Evanuris, who enslaved other elves
- The Dread Wolf Fen'harel AKA Solas freed the slaves from these false gods
- The Dalish facial tattoos, or vallaslin, were slave tattoos (which Fen'harel removed)
- The fall of the Arlathan was basically the result of elves fighting amongst themselves, and the humans simply came in and mopped up (compare this to the revelations in the Jaws of Hakkon DLC that the elves were at least partly responsible for the fall of the Dales)
"Not today, No-Face!" cried Fen'Harel.
In other words, contemporary Dalish culture is basically fake: a mish-mash of half-remembered history and distorted mythology. And did I mention that the elves are the most despised and discriminated-against minority in Thedas? So what the writers have done is take the lowliest people in their fantasy setting and ground them even further into the dirt.
Now, ever since Dragon Age: Origins, I've always felt that the Dalish were, if not an allegory for indigenous people, at least some degree of indigenous-coded. And lead writer David Gaider concurs:
But with Trespasser, BioWare has stumbled into a very old and enduring myth about indigenous people, which I've often heard referred to as "The Myth of the Vanishing Indian." The basic premise of this myth is that "real" indigenous culture died out centuries ago, and that what exists today is just a hollow, half-remembered version of the real thing. This is almost always paired with some statement about how indigenous people should "stop living in the past" and stop clinging to a culture that was dead and gone.
"No myth about Native people is as pervasive, pernicious, or self-serving as the myth of the vanishing Native, also known as "the vanishing Indian" or "the vanishing race." The myth, which had been building for centuries, reached an extreme at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, a time when the Indian wars of resistance had come to a conclusion, punctuated by the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890."
The constant suggestion that the elves were responsible for their own downfall is just the shit-cherry on top of a shit-sundae. If someone were to stand up in real life and declare that "Hey, you know the Trail of Tears? The Wounded Knee Massacre? The destruction of Tenochtitlan? We never did that! The natives did it to themselves!" then they would be correctly be labelled a genocide denier.
The writers clearly don't understand that cultures are not static things; they grow and change over time, and this is particularly true when said culture experiences a period of massive upheaval (such as losing all your land and being driven the margins of society). Which makes it even more galling how strangely unsympathetic the games are towards the Dalish attempts at recovering their history, because, judging from what we've seen, they're simply doing the best they can. The Dalish are a marginalised people, with little in the way of resources. They don't have armies or cities with which to build an economic base. Most of their former territory is now in the hands of human kingdoms where they are unwelcome, and I can imagine that many of their cultural artefacts are locked away in museums, universities, and private collections that they do not have access to.
The revelations about their facial tattoos also demonstrates that BioWare doesn't understand how symbols work, or how they can change meaning over time. A symbol by itself has no meaning besides what people choose to give it (there is a reason why travel guides often inform readers that certain gestures that are innocuous in their homeland might be perceived as extremely offensive in another country). The swastika, for instance, is an ancient symbol found across multiple cultures that only ever had a positive connotation. After World War II, however, the symbol became inextricably linked to Nazi Germany in the minds of Westerners, and now carries a powerful negative connotation.
For an opposite example, the Christian cross was originally a symbol of death by crucifixion, perhaps the most agonising death the Romans could devise. But Christians later reclaimed that symbol as one of faith and redemption.
And so it is with the Dalish. To wear their facial tattoos as a symbol of pride is to say to the world, "You have tried to erase us. You threw everything you could at us, every degradation, every act of violence, every act of erasure, but we are still here." That's a powerful statement, but BioWare treats this whole revelation about the origins of vallaslin like some kind of clever "Gotcha!" moment, as if to say, "Ha ha! Look at these dumb fools who can't even remember their history! Aren't they stupid?"
And of course, a Dalish Inquisitor has almost no reaction to any of this.
The most charitable interpretation I can think of for why BioWare did this was to establish some theme of "letting go of the past." In Origins, siding with Harrowmont (a staunch traditionalist) makes things far worse for Orzammar in the long run. Corypheus wants to restore Tevinter to its former glory and he's the villain of this story. Organisations such as the Chantry and the Seekers are shown to be deeply dysfunctional and in need of reform.
But saying "Stop living in the past!" means something very different when you're talking to a declining imperial power (or some chud on Twitter with a Greco-Roman statue as their PFP who spends their days spouting off fascist dogwhistles) and when you're talking to a group of people who are the victims of historical wrongs who continue to suffer in the present because of those wrongs, and who are still the victims of intense racial bigotry. In that case, telling someone to let go of the past really means, "Stop bringing up all the bad shit we did to you (and are continuing to do to you)."
Also, consider how this changes the game's portrayal of Sera. The impression I get is that the writers wanted to convey the idea that minorities can internalise racist attitudes, and that being a victim of oppression doesn't automatically make one a good person, but the revelations in Trespasser effectively make it so that Sera's internalised prejudice is 100% correct. And that is, to put it delicately, just a bit fucked up.
(And on top of that, she's Inquisition's only representative of City Elf culture, and the only lesbian love interest. So if you were interested in either of the things, then you're shit out of luck).
Now, I'm not a mind-reader, so I can't say for certain what BioWare's reasons for this whole debacle was (beyond just simple racism and unexamined colonial prejudices), but as I said earlier, I think it's a confluence of three factors:
- The Dragon Age games have always tried (with varying degrees of success) to present themselves as being darker and more mature than their previous fantasy games, and that means bringing up real world evils such as racism and religious fanaticism.
- At the same time, Dragon Age is a very conventional fantasy, with elves, dwarves, dragons, and ancient evils. This type of fantasy has largely fallen out of favour in the literary world, and you generally won't see it on bookshelves outside of D&D tie-in novels. And imagine that BioWare was more than a bit self-conscious about creating such a world, so what do you do when you are embarrassed by what you're writing? Simple: you take the most obvious features of the genre (like elves and dwarves), shit ALL over them, and then adopt a smug attitude about it. Or as people on the internet like to say, "sUbVeRtInG aNd DeCoNsTrUcTiNg TrOpEs."
So the elves have to the victims of racism, because racism is a serious subject that games must seriously discuss if they want to be taken seriously, but at the same time...don't those smug, pointy-eared bastards have it coming? It turns out their entire culture is a lie! TROPE SUBVERTED! Now people can go to the game's TV Tropes page and add the word "deconstruction" 20,000 times while jerking themselves raw!
- The third factor is the contrived moral greyness and "BOTH SIDES!" politics BioWare is so fond of. Their thinking is that "Black and white conflicts are stupid, childish, unrealistic, and boring! Morally-grey conflicts are where it's at, and the morally-greyer they are the better they are!"
The backstory of the Dalish made them out to be victims, and if they are victims, doesn't that imply that there is a right side and a wrong side? And if a conflict has a right side and a wrong side, then doesn't that mean it's not morally grey, and if it's not morally grey then won't a bunch of boring nerds on the internet whine that they can't take this game seriously? So naturally, the Dalish must be made complicit in their own persecution.
It's like a perfect storm of shit. At this point I'm morbidly curious about where Dread Wolf is going to with these developments.
