It’s insane to me that Dragon Age 2 is sandwiched in between two WAY HUGER and WAY MORE SUCCESSFUL games about more traditional fantasy protagonists facing off against world ending threats and winning and it’s this…weird, raw, personal tragedy about how no matter what you do, you can’t always stop crisis and disaster from occurring. Like The Hero or Ferelden, no matter who they were, wants to stop a Blight. The Inquisitor wants to repair the sky. And Hawke, like, wants to make some money, hang around their friends, and keep their family and their adoptive city safe. And they can’t even fucking do that, so unlike the heroes before and after them. You spend seven years in Kirkwall until the game says, “yeah, no matter what, the prejudices and traumas and hurts of this world are Too Much for one person to stop them. The world changes, wars roll over the land, you cannot stop history, Hawke. You tried. You failed.” And then you just sit there, sixteen years old, listening to “I’m Not Calling You A Liar” and you’re like….well, I guess I really wasn’t a hero. Damn. I love it.
I always felt that in both of Bioware's 2 most famous franchises, the middle child was always the most emotionally powerful, and that's not a coincidence with their pattern of going big-small-big with the scale of the narrative. The writing is always stronger when the story "scopes down" to just a specific, very fleshed out ragtag bunch of misfits. That's just the magic formula.
