Writer focused on prose, poetry, and critical essays. I'm the guy that wrote the big Nier essay. Follow my main blog: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/
Your Journey Ends: A Parting Retrospective on Dragon Age
IX. Freedom To Live
We all know how The Veilguard turned out, and how it wasn’t the sequel I had hoped for after a decade of waiting. Now BioWare dangles by a thread, a shadow of a shadow of its former self. Dragon Age is over, and it didn’t go out gracefully. What now? Can I look at the previous titles, which each meant so much to me in their own unique ways, without feeling pangs of sadness? Has the pain of knowing how this all winds up changed them?
I would like to call back to the Inquisitor’s dilemma at the end of “Trespasser” – namely, how they cope with the corruption of the Inquisition. Echoing Cassandra’s speech from the prologue, the Inquisitor stands firm, expressing how proud they are in the work they’ve done and the good they’ve accomplished, even if their organization now poses a danger. They affirm that their efforts and sacrifices were worth it, and acknowledge the passionate people who made it all possible. Even though things didn’t work out the way they planned, even though the immediate future looks bleak, even though the Inquisition no longer stands for what it originally embodied, even if the most powerful thing they can do now is abandon their power, the Inquisitor expresses no regrets for their intentions or actions to help save the world.
I find this poignant. Dragon Age will always be important to me, as well as other fans, for moments like these – moments that speak to us, moments that capture our hearts, moments that give us chills, moments that make us cry. We were never wrong to do so, and we won’t be wrong to feel that way in the future either. I think Origins, DA2, and Inquisition all convey a clear message about respecting and cherishing that which has meaning to you while you can. The future may kill you; it may undermine your accomplishments, rendering them all futile; it may even erase the truth of your history and falsify your legacy. Those treasured moments still matter, and will continue to matter.
The Veilguard was a disappointment, and to an extent, that disappointment will always hurt. But I don’t think it has the power to undo the affection that I feel. Not as long as I hold my head high and carry no regrets (ironically, a relevant theme to that game).
I think Sheryl Chee is right. Dragon Age is yours. It’s always been yours. From the moment it made an impact on you, it’s been a part of you, and it’s belonged to you. And as long as you let it, it will stay with you, in whatever form you wish.
Bear your blade and raise it high.
– Hunter Galbraith
Full article: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2025/03/29/your-journey-ends-a-parting-retrospective-on-dragon-age/
Your Journey Ends: A Parting Retrospective on Dragon Age (Part Eight)
VIII. Rescue From Without
I feel like I still haven’t explained why Inquisition is my favorite in the series. Sure, I listed many of its qualities and explained some of its hidden depth, but I could do the same for the other two if I really forced myself to emphasize the positive. Something predisposes me to looking on the third game with fonder eyes. I think that comes from my first experience with it.
In autumn of 2014, I was intent on killing myself. I was in the midst of the worst period of my life so far. Everything I cared about seemed to be slipping away from me. My disagreeable living situation had me feeling trapped. I panicked about school. My relationships with friends and family were crumbling. I could scarcely make it through a day without breaking down in sobs or screaming my head off or throwing chairs or smashing my skull against a wall. I thought I was drowning, and struggled daily to maintain composure among my peers and act like nothing was wrong. When nothing seemed to work, I felt like it was time to end it all.
Around this point, Dragon Age: Inquisition released. I had been curious about it, as it seemed like an ambitious return to form for BioWare after the controversial titles of Dragon Age II and Mass Effect 3. I cautiously picked it up, wary of the sting of disappointment that those games had inflicted upon me. To my surprise, I just got… sucked in. I can’t quite describe it, but everything in Inquisition just clicked with me. The characters, the atmosphere, the art direction, the exploration, the combat, it came together exactly how I wanted it to – how I needed it to.
Even with the busy work quests of the open world sections, I found endless fun. The massive scope impressed me, immersed me, took my mind off my troubles. I was more interested in discovering what was in this world and getting to know these characters than I was with my orchestrating my own demise. I played and replayed, pumping out character after character to see the variances that could occur in the story and distinctions between classes. Before I knew it, I’d logged hundreds of hours into the game. By that point, my mental health had started to improve.
It might sound silly, but I do think that Dragon Age: Inquisition saved my life.
On the topic of schmaltz, one of my favorite scenes in the game, second only to the final conversation with Solas in “Trespasser”, is also one of the most widely mocked: “The Dawn Will Come” scene. Yes, the moment where the refugees of Haven unite in song. To many, it’s hard not to laugh at this moment. While obviously sentimental, I don’t find this scene as ridiculous as some others do, partially because we’re witnessing a religious community whose faith literally revolves around singing (they’re clearly performing one of their oft recited hymns), and partially because I find it such an effectively touching moment. There’s something moving about seeing the displaced faithful of Haven, having just lost their homes and seen their defenders and would-be saviors fall, all rally around the despondent Herald to offer a melody of hope through the darkness. In a game that often questions the legitimacy and morality of faith, this scene shows it in an unequivocally positive light. They’re not singing about how the Herald is their messiah, or how they should best serve or praise the Maker – they’re gathering out of respect, supporting one another in a troubled time, and placing their hopes upon someone they think can deliver them. They believe this even when the protagonist no longer believes in themselves, because they’ve witnessed their courage and their failure, and they believe that as long as they’re alive, they have the chance to rebuild. As long as you hold on, hope will shine once more.
I watched all of this happen for the first time as the dawn literally broke outside my window, and it made for a sublime experience.
From there, we’re treated to the majestic cutscene revealing Skyhold, the Inquisition’s new base of operations, as well as the Herald’s formal induction as the Inquisitor – the leader who can validate the faith of those who believed in them at their lowest. After that, I hopped back into the open world and slew my first dragon after an intense, riveting battle. As difficult as it was, I overcame it. It felt glorious. Hitting rock bottom, then rising from the ashes like that, no other game has ever made me feel the same sequence of emotions that Inquisition gave me at the end of its first act.
I resonated with the Inquisitor once again when I selected a certain dialogue option during “Trespasser”, prompting them to plea, “I don’t want to die.” The moment was so raw and real, a rare instance of vulnerability in BioWare’s otherwise resolute and courageous protagonists. I think I really felt for the Inquisitor there. I had relearned to appreciate my life through my adventure with Inquisition, and hearing my Inquisitor’s quivering voice, fearing her own mortality, gave me a sobering realization that I really didn’t want to die either.
So maybe Inquisition isn’t as good of an RPG as Origins. It definitely lacks a lot of that game’s depth when you compare them head to head. And maybe Inquisition is burdened by more flaws than I mentioned in this essay. None of that really matters. To me, it’s still the most emotionally resonant game in the series, and one to which I am forever grateful.
I’m confident there are others that feel the same way about Origins, or DA2, or maybe even The Veilguard. They all have their flaws, and we all have our preferences. But every fan of the series is here because the stories touched us in some way.
After the cliffhanger ending of “Trespasser”, I couldn’t wait to see what would happen in the follow-up. I anticipated traveling with returning cast members from Inquisition, tracking Solas through the bustling streets of Tevinter’s cities, and finally witnessing a showdown between him and the Inquisitor in the legendary Black City.
I had no idea how wrong I was.
Full article: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2025/03/29/your-journey-ends-a-parting-retrospective-on-dragon-age/
Your Journey Ends: A Parting Retrospective on Dragon Age (Part Seven)
VII. A Higher Power
Dragon Age: Inquisition’s core tension lies in the aperture between faith and falsehood – or alternatively, authenticity vs artificiality. Throughout the story, the newly formed Inquisition manipulates the populace’s faith for its own ends. Josephine and Leliana both allow rumors to grow about the so-called Herald of Andraste’s divine ordainment in order to garner support. With the religious establishment in shambles and the southern countries too tied up in their own conflicts (like the Mage-Templar War or the Orlesian Civil War) to respond to the threat of the Breach, people start looking for hope wherever they can find it. Early on, the player can discover a small cult that’s begun worshiping the Breach out in the Hinterlands. In sealing a nearby Fade rift, the Inquisition can absorb this cult into their own power structure. A similar feat in the Fallow Mire convinces an Avvar Sky Watcher that the Herald was sent by their own deity, the Lady of the Skies, and earns his loyalty. From the beginning, Inquisition emphasizes the persuasive effects of faith and how it’s used to magnify power. As it goes along, further questions arise from this. Do noble goals justify the manipulation of faith, or will people naturally see what they want to see anyway? Can a historically oppressive power be transformed into something revolutionary, as mage or elven Inquisitors might try to do with their Chantry-based Inquisition? Is this power, founded on dubious grounds, legitimate in representing the people’s best interest, or is it doomed to become corrupt and seed new injustices? The later sections of Inquisition interrogate these questions.
Crises of faith summoned by questions of authenticity permeate the personal stories of most of the cast. Cassandra Pentaghast is a “Seeker of Truth” for the Chantry, and she lives up to her title. One of the most pious characters, her faith is challenged repeatedly – first by the corruption of the Templar Order, then through her interactions with the benevolent “demon” Cole, then her discovery of the Seekers’ methods to reverse the Rite of Tranquility, and then the dilemma of how to properly reform the Chantry to make it more tolerant and welcoming to disenfranchised people. By her own admission, she wants to rectify past grievances, not avenge them. She holds firm in her belief in the Chant of Light and the Maker, but must make accommodations to account for all the truths that she uncovers. Her faith is even challenged by an apparition of Divine Justinia, which the game calls into question as to whether or not it’s truly the Divine’s soul or a spirit basing itself on her persona (and whether or not this simulacrum makes a substantive difference). In her steadfast commitment to justice and her struggle to confront her doubts, Cassandra mirrors many of the ordeals the protagonist undergoes, and she emerges as one of my favorite characters in the series.
The crisis of authenticity often connects to an obfuscation of identity – either through unconscious confusion or willful deceit. Preeminent among the confused is Cole, a spirit emulating the form of and identity of a dead young man. The Cole that the player interacts with is originally a spirit of Compassion who came to comfort a prisoner as he starved to death, then unintentionally assumed a physical form based upon this man. He even absorbs some of his memories. Recalling the apparition of Divine Justinia, the game leaves it open to interpretation whether or not the new entity is an extension of the old, an illusory mimic from the spirit world, or, in Cole’s special case, a whole new person entirely. While his persona is based on the original Cole, it’s an idealized one – one where he was never born a mage and thus never would’ve suffered imprisonment and starvation. Nevertheless, his roots still intermingle with those of the original, and his anger boils over upon discovering the templar who killed “him.” Does this rage truly belong to Cole, or is his true place in the world that of a healing spirit, as dictated by his original nature? Varric and Solas represent these two respective sides of the argument, with both of them interacting with Cole as surrogate father figures throughout the game. This argument over the essence of existence brilliantly embodies both characters’ philosophies and sheds light on their interior struggles and fixations. Inquisition gives both interpretations of Cole equal weight, since they are, in essence, both true. While the game concerns itself with the dichotomy of truth and falsehood, it also keenly acknowledges that reality is often paradoxical. Cole foregrounds that deconstruction.
He’s far from the only one who doesn’t understand his true nature, though. Sera is a self-styled rebel without a cause who delights in nothing more than subverting the rich and powerful. You might think she’d therefore champion progressive causes and want to liberate Thedas’s oppressed minorities, but you’d be wrong. Sera draws a distinction between “normal” people and mages, elves, etc. She views all forms of magic with suspicion and disgust, and considers elves (other than herself) self-righteous blowhards with victim complexes. Sera’s bigotry stems from her (s)elf-loathing. Early childhood experiences with her human foster mother conditioned her to be ashamed of her elven lineage. She also demonstrates latent magical abilities, as well as some unexplained sense of precognition. Beyond her magic potential, a convincing fan theory suggests she might be a descendant or reincarnation of the elven goddess Andruil – ironic, considering Sera despises the culture and considers the pantheon to be no more than a pack of demons. In any case, she remains uninterested in replacing broken systems with something new and just, instead focusing on humbling whoever is in power. Sera’s revolutionary attitude isn’t backed up by any ideology – she’s fighting for a perpetual status quo, and that includes a nobility for her to target. She’s willing to disenfranchise other people like herself because she denies those parts of herself. Rhetorically, this serves to drive a sympathetic player further toward Solas’s side in their disputes, priming his eventual betrayal to sting all the more. Sera’s psychology fascinates me, but I think she’s one of the weaker characters simply because we don’t see a true conclusion to her story – neither an explanation to the mysteries about her abilities, nor a resolution to her immature avoidance complex. Her absence from The Veilguard’s remains one of that game’s biggest missed opportunities.
A more fulfilled character arc can be found in the Iron Bull. Known among his Ben-Hassrath cohorts as “Hissrad” (“liar”), Bull works as a spy for the Qun under the front of leading a mercenary company. The player is always meant to question how much of Bull’s boisterous bravado is genuine, and how much is a calculated part of his act. Where does the fun-loving mercenary end and the government spy begin? He’s slid into a role, but it’s a role that fits him, and one where he’s happy. From this situation arises Bull’s identity crisis: he thinks that he’s the king of subterfuge, but in actuality, he might already be a Tal-Vashoth (Qun deserter) deep down, still wearing the mask of a loyal agent. Bull judges Tal-Vashoth as savages with uncontrollable impulses and rage, and thus relies on the Qun’s teachings for security. But he finds that comfort and security among his boys in the Bull’s Chargers, especially Krem. Krem, a transgender man, prompts Bull to explain the concept of “aqun-athlok” to justify the apparent inconsistency between Bull’s acceptance of a trans identities and the rigid gender roles of the Qun, as defined in Origins. According to Bull, because Krem fights as a soldier, which is a man’s job, that makes him a man. I personally believe this works better not as hard canon for standard qunari treatment of transgender people (though The Veilguard would codify it as so regardless), and instead prefer to view it as Bull trying to reconcile his two identities. I don’t believe the Qun’s regressive gender politics need to be rehabilitated (they are, after all, a totalitarian government), and I think this reading emphasizes Bull’s love and respect for Krem, as well as his gravitation away from his role as a Ben-Hassrath tool. Bull’s own story can be interpreted through the lens of a queer reading. Should the player choose to save Bull’s Chargers, thereby betraying the qunari alliance and branding Bull a Tal-Vashoth, the Inquisitor can insist that his name is no longer “Hissrad” and affirms that he is “the Iron Bull.” On this path, Bull rejects the identity his society assigned him during his youth and strikes out on a new path – with a name of his choosing. In doing so, he comes to terms with the fact that he’s been Tal-Vashoth for a while now: the authentic Bull was always the mercenary captain, not the spy pretending to be one. The alternative path, where Bull remains loyal to the Qun, sees him betray the Inquisitor and die during the events of the “Trespasser” expansion. Resolving his identity crisis is literally a mortal ultimatum.
Leliana returns in Inquisition, and she teeters on the edge between two selves, as she did in Origins. Will she be the pious, compassionate soul that Divine Justinia wanted her to be, or will she fall to her darker nature as the calculating spymaster who revels in espionage and assassination? Again, the player can influence how she ends up (and if she inherits the office of Divine) based on a number of decisions throughout the game. Inquisition even sees fit to address her mysterious survival in World States where she should be dead, implying that we might not be dealing with the original Leliana, but an imposter lyrium golem, somewhat akin to Cole. The full truth eludes us, but like so many other characters, she doesn’t seem to know her true self either.
This trend applies to the main villain as well. While I think Corypheus fails to be imposing after his admittedly impressive premiere in siege of Haven (mostly because he suffers defeat after defeat for the rest of the game), he’s effective in another way: as a fool, unwittingly playing the role of the fake devil to the Inquisitor’s fake messiah. Like Solas (the man who sets him up for failure), he’s hopelessly stuck in the past, yearning for bygone days and stuck on a vision of how the world “should be.” His delusions of grandeur are a means of coping with that, hoping to restore the glory of the Tevinter Imperium to what it was back in his era. In reality, he’s no contender for godhood, but a huge theatre kid. He dramatically sacrifices Divine Justinia in a blood magic ritual seemingly for symbolic reasons – establishing himself above the Maker in terms of divinity. Furthermore, he constructs an artificial Archdemon to represent his dominance over his old masters.2
“The Old Gods are no more. The Maker never was.”
Yet as he falls before the might of the Inquisitor, Corypheus cries out for Dumat and the Old Gods to save him. Corypheus – or rather, Sethius Amladaris – was a fraud all along, never boasting the authority of the divine. He merely convinces himself that he is something more through his arrogance and inability to accept change.
Other characters embody duplicitous identities more consciously. Vivienne de Fer deftly navigates the theatrical politics of the Orlesian imperial court, never fully revealing her intentions or betraying her feelings. Like the rest of the nobility, she wears a mask – if not over her face, then over her heart. Is her love for Duke Bastien genuine, or is he part of another power play for her? Fearing irrelevance, Vivienne is determined to climb the social ladder. She wields a Machiavellian shrewdness that eschews sentiment in favor of practicality and control.
Duplicity can also be invoked as a product of guilt. The Grey Warden we know as “Blackwall” is actually Thom Rainier, a wanted war criminal living with the burden of his past misdeeds. Rainier took the opportunity to assume a new identity after the real Warden Blackwall died in a darkspawn attack. He thought it best not to deprive the world of a good man, and sought to make amends by continuing that man’s legacy. Like Cole, he’s taken up the mantle of a dead man. For “Blackwall”, the most terrifying thing is… Thom Rainier. He’s not just afraid of having his stolen valor discovered, but afraid of being that person. He assumes that Rainier is tarnished, broken, unforgivable. Living as Blackwall is the only opportunity he has to lead a virtuous life, to be a person Rainier could never become. Yet it’s all based on a lie, and that eats at him throughout the game, especially as the phony Warden charade gets harder to maintain. If discovered and forgiven, he opts to retain the Blackwall name as an honorary title for a time, before accepting his capacity for change and reclaiming his old name in “Trespasser.” Truth and authenticity are essential for living with himself.
There are a few more instances of fake or fraudulent characters, such as the Envy Demon that masquerades as Lord Seeker Lucius and attempts to steal the Herald’s identity. However, none of their lies compare in magnitude or complexity to that of Solas, a.k.a. Fen’Harel, a.k.a. the Dread Wolf, a.k.a. my favorite character in the franchise.
While first presenting himself as a humble apostate mage with a passion for dreaming and philosophizing, Solas is actually a millenia-old quasi-deity responsible for everything that goes wrong in Inquisition. His dialogue wonderfully foreshadows his true nature without ever making it too obvious for first-time players, and the twist reveal of his true identity is genuinely shocking. In addition to obfuscating his past from the party, his personal dilemma likewise involves a crisis of what’s “real.” At first, he doesn’t view the people of this era as real, thinking, autonomous entities. Having come from a world where magic flowed freely, where people’s minds and imaginations were connected more closely with the ethereal Fade, he likens modernity to “walking through a world of Tranquil.” He cannot reconcile the difference between how the world once was with how it is now. Knowing that he catalyzed this change thousands of years ago by creating the Veil to quarter off the Fade fills him with guilt, regret, and a desire to correct his mistake. He wistfully yearns for a forgotten past, the restoration of which would require sacrificing the world that exists now. He simply cannot live in the present, because nobody feels or understands things the way he does.
Despite his personal deception, Solas overly concerns himself with validating authenticity (even though he recognizes it’s often subjective, especially with matters of the Fade) and opposing falsehood, specifically as it pertains to elven history and legend. This is best illustrated in the scene where he tells a romanced Inquisitor that the vallaslin tattoos that Dalish elves wear actually originate as slave markings. Solas proves unable to fully separate these markings’ original meaning from their new, reclaimed meaning. For all of his introspection, he’s shown to be rigid and restrictive in his worldview, such as his reluctance to acknowledge Cole as a person, rather than a spirit.3 Like Sera, this ancient god of rebellion is paradoxically conservative (ironic, considering their mutual animosity). Though he may support mage liberation and oppose slavery, he claims no kinship with the modern elves, due to the aforementioned cultural differences. He also considers dwarves as pitiful fragments of what they once were, and qunari as mindless savages. He tends to view the bygone days of the pre-Veil world as an ideal to which Thedas should return. And above all, he’s scared that nobody will see things his way, or understand how he feels. He fears, more than anything, dying alone.
Revealing that the elven gods were in actuality just powerful tyrants rather than benevolent primordial creators, Solas expresses remorse at how much he altered the world to seal them away. As such, he admonishes the Inquisitor against hasty decision-making, abusing power, or making choices they’d be unable to live with – like him. His ambition to merge the world with the Fade and restore people to how they were in his memories is unknowingly validated by the protagonist during the quest “In Hushed Whispers.” In this quest, the protagonist and Dorian wind up in a dismal alternate future, where Corypheus rules and the Breach threatens to consume the world. To rectify this, they aim to return to their time and prevent this from ever transpiring. A future iteration of Leliana, however, insists that this world is as real as theirs. Erasing it from existence is no different from destroying it – yet the Inquisitor and Dorian follow through with their plan for the sake of their own time. Future Leliana acquiesces, since little hope remains for her world anyway. So as the Inquisitor pleads with Solas in the finale of “Trespasser” not to delete the world that everyone lives in, we are invited to sympathize with Solas’s reasoning that, from his perspective, none of this is “real”, and comes at the expense of an idealized potential future. It’s a clever narrative trick that I appreciate.4
Which leads us, at last, to the Inquisitor themselves. Our protagonist, the so-called “Herald of Andraste”, personifies both ends of the authentic-artificial spectrum as both subject and object. They are, at once, a hapless bystander who fumbles into their “chosen one” status and a calculating commander of a religious paramilitary organization. They might not even subscribe to the Andrastian faith on which the Inquisition is founded. Though they use the myth surrounding them to establish their initial base, the Inquisitor’s power comes not from the Andrastian Maker, but from touching Solas’s magical orb. Nevertheless, the Inquisition becomes a force to be reckoned with on a theocratic level, with even the Chantry looking to its members to find a replacement for their own Divine. Regardless of whether or not the “Herald” believes in their own divinity, they take advantage of faith and convert it into power, and then use that power to resolve the crises of the Breach and Corypheus. Until it comes crashing down, of course. Female elven Inquisitors can earn an extra twist of the knife if they happened to romance Solas. In this case, they really do replicate Andraste’s story, but not in the way that anyone wanted – a powerful woman, brought low by the scheming of others, pleading with her god-lover not to condemn the world to death. Playing the role of heir to her oppressing culture’s prophetess for power, only to be forced to relive that woman’s traumas – it all makes for deliciously cruel irony.
But their story extends beyond this. They’re making history. But the crisis of authenticity infects history itself, with power expanded and co-opted through both faith and force. Religious and cultural meaning frequently derives from misrepresentation, conscious or otherwise. We witness this in the aforementioned vallaslin scene, where the misunderstood history of the tattoos imbues them with new, reclaimed cultural value, separate from their initial gruesome intent. This case positions faith in opposition to authenticity – or rather, faith transforms the artificial into the authentic. Other such examples of religious appropriation litter the open world segments. It’s a shame that Inquisition’s exploration often feels bloated and lacking direction, because skipping it will cause players to miss out on things like the astrariums, which reveal how Tevinter built its religion on the bones of the elven pantheon (which contains its own fabric of half-truths and lies).
Historical revisionism stares down the protagonist when they discover the previous Inquisitor, Ameridan, during the “Jaws of Hakkon” expansion. Contrary to Chantry records, Ameridan is revealed to be both an elf and a mage. After fighting to bring order to the world and establish the Andrastian faith’s power, the church nonetheless erased his identity and oppressed people like him – first by locking up mages, then by displacing the elves from the Dales. Coming face to face with Ameridan is an important component of the Inquisitor’s journey, as it prompts them to reflect on what their own legacy will be – and if they’ll be the one to control it.
All of this comes to a head in “Trespasser”, which is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of the Dragon Age franchise. Everything escalates perfectly as the material and thematic conflicts of the game reach a boiling point. As outside forces work to dismantle the Inquisition, citing the player’s unlawful occupation of forts throughout Fereldan and Orlais, internal sabotage and abuse likewise becomes apparent. If the organization isn’t already corrupt, it soon will be. The Inquisition might survive as yet another arm of the Chantry, but considering all we’ve seen about how power and history are co-opted and abused, is that a worthwhile compromise? This is compounded by the other revelations made in the expansion. Will the Inquisitor be a tyrant (or an enabler of one) remembered fondly, like the elven gods, or a liberator treated like a devil, like the Dread Wolf? Power, it seems, is ultimately unstable, illustrated beautifully – albeit unsubtly – by the Inquisitor’s magical Anchor melting down. As it grows exponentially more powerful, it comes closer to consuming and killing them. This makes for a thrilling finale, fulfilling the climactic power fantasy as the player destroys enemies en masse, all the while carrying meaningful dramatic weight. Ultimately, the only way to survive is to dissolve power, to relinquish the Anchor and abandon this version of the Inquisition before it morphs into something monstrous.
The finale is meant to leave us beset by uncertainty, skeptical of the righteousness of our actions. Was there meaning in the madness? Before discussing Inquisition’s answer to that, I would like to share how the game influenced my own search for meaning.
2. The Veilguard would later establish that his contrivance is how all Archdemons are made, including the Old God pantheon. Thus, the idea of it being “false” is complicated, since all Archdemons are canoncially conduits for the Evanuris’ immortality, just as Corypheus’s was for him. However, I maintain that his mimicry of the Old Gods’ form was still meaningful and suggestive of his alleged supremacy over them. Additionally, his false Archdemon’s artificiality as a being separate from the true pantheon classifies it as another example of Inquisition’s focus on illusory or deceitful identities. ↩︎
3. This could also be due to the fact that Solas, himself, was a spirit at one point, and regrets taking on a physical form. He wants to spare Cole that agony. In either case, he’s clinging to an inherent, essentialist worldview to rationalize his insecurities. ↩︎
4. Once again, The Veilguard complicates this interpretation. The fourth game states that Solas’s ritual to combine the two worlds would unleash an army of demons that would kill “thousands”, not unlike the Breach in Inquisition. However, I don’t think this is what was implied in “Trespasser.” In fact, I think Solas’s references to “raw chaos” and “recreating” his time implies something akin to overwriting the existing universe to replace it with his desired one. Concept art for “Joplin” also implies this. ↩︎
Full article: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2025/03/29/your-journey-ends-a-parting-retrospective-on-dragon-age/
Your Journey Ends: A Parting Retrospective on Dragon Age (Part Six)
VI. Apotheosis
At a glance, Dragon Age: Inquisition is deeply flawed. The open world, while wide and vibrant, lacks direction in its quest design, with no clear distinction between which quests are rewarding or interesting amid a sea of chores. Skipping the open world entirely, however, robs the player of vital character interactions, lore tidbits, atmosphere, and overall makes the game feel too brief. Thus, there is a problem of not knowing which quests are worth spending your time on, and how much. It doesn’t help that mounts are virtually useless for traversing these vast regions. The war table operations present interesting quests with compelling decision-making opportunities, but their timed nature stifles them, gutting their potential. Combat has shifted even more toward real-time action, and the tactical macros are more limited than ever. Even in the otherwise excellent main story, issues arise. Namely, the main villain loses all semblance of menace after the first encounter with him.
With all of that said, you might wonder why Dragon Age: Inquisition is my favorite game in the series, why it’s one of my favorite games of all time, why I’ve logged almost 500 hours in it across multiple playthroughs, and why it’s my main impetus for writing this essay. The answer is complicated, and has as much to do with my own state of mind at the time that it came out as it does with the game’s intrinsic qualities.
But first, I want to address some of the previous criticisms. Frankly, none of those things bothered me. Inquisition released in 2014, before the open world fatigue hit. Back then, only really big and prestigious titles had huge, lavishly detailed worlds to explore. It also came out a year before The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), which would set a higher standard for open world interactivity and immersive quest design. As such, playing Inquisition on release never felt subpar to me – the world was breathtaking, and it allowed you to delve into the realm of Thedas more substantially than ever. It offered a sense of freedom akin to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), but accompanied it with better writing and characterization. Since the standard of open world gameplay has raised substantially in the intervening years, Inquisition’s foray might not be as impressive to modern players, but it was so easy to get hooked on it at the time.
Combat, too, never irked me – though I also never cared too much for the combat in either Origins or DA2. I think there’s a satisfying flow to Inquisition’s battles that rewards both proper builds and real-time mechanical mastery. I know I’m in the minority, but I honestly like the emphasis on magical barriers, warrior guard generation, and rechargeable potions over healing spells and inventory stockpiling. Not to say the latter is bad, but I think the former works well with how Inquisition integrates its encounters into exploration. Plus, you can run as a knight-enchanter and cleave through enemies with a lightsaber.
But it’s in the aesthetic, artistic, and character departments that Inquisition truly shines. I think the series found its ideal tone here. It’s lighter, more hopeful than those of Origins and DA2, but not at the expense of nuance or maturity. After what I considered the overbearing edginess of the second installment – not to mention the suffocating grimness of Mass Effect 3 (2012) – Inquisition’s earnest and optimistic outlook appealed to me. I also think this is where the series’s art direction peaked. Origins presents a realistic, immersive world, but one that’s also drab and lacking in distinctness. DA2 went for a more stylized, exaggerated look to everything. Inquisition gravitates more toward the realistic proportions and shading of Origins, but spices up some of the designs to reflect the opulence of the Orlesian setting, as well as injecting much more color into the world. This, too, was a welcome sight in 2014, as we were finally escaping the curse of games at large looking gray, brown, and muddy. The diversity of Inquisition’s biomes also acted as a much needed reprieve from Dragon Age 2’s endless reiteration of the same dungeons.
Inquisition boasts my favorite cast of the entire series. The player has twelve main disciples (not exactly subtle, in a game about faith), and all of them have unique silhouettes that set them apart, without anyone looking too over-the-top like Isabela or out-of-place like Fenris. Their personalities are just as distinct, and all loaded with hidden depth that can be teased out. Banter sessions are fantastically entertaining and often display conflicts of ideals that give the world texture (without ever making me question why these people are working together).
I never tallied up and compared the total number of choices between DA2 and Inquisition against each other, but I always felt like I had more influence over the story of the latter. The player can choose the race of their avatar again, with the addition of qunari added to the standard selection of human, elf, and dwarf. The mage/templar choice in the first act influences a variety of aspects going forward, including three pairs of mutually exclusive boss encounters, different sub-villains, and variations on the epilogue slides. The ending that decides who gets inducted as the new Divine and what policies they implement also depends on a medley of choices made throughout the game, rather than a single critical moment. You also get to choose who rules Orlais from a set of five options, the status of the Grey Wardens in Orlais, and even the fate of Hawke. Not to mention the judgments that the Inquisitor makes from their throne, where humbled and defeated NPCs face trial and punishment at the player’s mercy.
All this contributes to an awesome sense of power, in stark contrast to the previous game. Indeed, Inquisition’s illusion of power is intoxicating. There’s an inherent coolness in managing an entire organization, deploying troops and moving mountains at the player’s whim, and recruiting NPCs to populate your personal castle and serve your cause. Exploring the open world and seeing fortresses the Inquisition’s conquered, towns under its protection, or soldiers delivering you treasure out in the field – it all generates this palpable sense of authority that makes roleplaying as a (reluctant) messiah more real and gratifying. “Power” is such an important word for Inquisition that it’s literally used as a currency for the war table operations.
The other operative word is “faith.” In addition to its religious themes, which we’ll touch on soon, Inquisition seems to reward players’ faith for sticking with the series to this point – especially regarding how it carries over past decisions in interesting ways. We finally follow up on Morrigan and her potential child, as well as Alistair, Hawke, and tons of small, personally crafted references and cameos. More importantly, it answers some the major mysteries that the series has lingered on, assuring the audience that it is, in fact, going somewhere with its overarching story. We learn truths about red lyrium, Flemeth, the Blight, the enigmatic Titans, and the elusive Dread Wolf. Inquisition reinvigorated my interest in the lore of Dragon Age after I thought I had given up. In many ways, it felt like the sequel I wanted after Origins.
Beyond these appeals, faith and power both play critical roles in the game’s themes and the individual arcs of its major characters. And these concepts do not go uncriticized within the narrative itself.
Full article: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2025/03/29/your-journey-ends-a-parting-retrospective-on-dragon-age/
Your Journey Ends: A Parting Retrospective on Dragon Age (Part Five)
V. There Can Be No Peace
In keeping with the alliterative naming scheme we devised for Origins with “death vs defiance”, I’d like to propose that Dragon Age II’s core thematic tension is between freedom and futility. Numerous characters and groups strive to secure better futures for themselves, often risking their lives for the promise of freedom. Yet time and again, these efforts are met with failure. Very few of Dragon Age II’s stories have happy endings. Whereas Origins usually gave the player ideal ways to resolve quests (expelling Connor’s demon with the help of the Circle, breaking the werewolf curse, etc.) and gave opportunities for each of its major characters to come out on top in the end, DA2, by contrast, drags its characters further down the more they struggle. Whether undone through their own faults or plagued by misfortune, characters in Dragon Age II, despite their earnest efforts to achieve freedom and sanctuary, often end their journeys worse off than when they started.
Take perhaps the most deeply flawed individual in the game, Anders. He wants nothing more than to ensure the freedom of mages. In the Kirkwall Circle of Magi (charmingly called the “Gallows”), mages are subject to stringent restrictions, coercion, and violence. As alluded to earlier, it’s described more like a concentration camp than a cloistered academy. Anders’s desire to help the spirit of Justice from Origins’s “Awakening” expansion leads him to adopt the spirit as its new host. But his enmity at the injustice suffered by mages warps the spirit into one of Vengeance, recursively fueling Anders’s righteous anger. No matter what he tries, though, the situation in Kirkwall never gets any better – templar abuses run rampant, and mages succumb to despair and possession by demons. In desperation, Anders resorts to terrorism, bombing the city’s Chantry and killing the moderate Grand Cleric Elthina. His expressed goal is one of accelerationism – by removing the centrist negotiators of compromise through such a brazenly violent act, the templars will aim to punish all mages for his crime, thus forcing them to stand up and defend their lives. In his quest to liberate his fellow sufferers, Anders drags them into a revolution that will only condemn them to more fear, suspicion, and scorn. If that doesn’t seem self-sabotaging enough, Anders can strangely be persuaded by a rival Hawke to battle on behalf of the templars and atone by forcefully quelling the rebellion he started. In either case, Anders’s struggle for mage freedom arguably makes things worse.
Merrill similarly wants to restore the elven people to their former glory, freeing them from the indignity they endure as a migratory, stateless society. In trying to repair an Eluvian – a relic from the ancient elven empire – Merrill deals with a powerful demon. In an attempt to protect Merrill from the demon’s trickery and eventual possession, her clan leader allows herself to be possessed, forcing Merrill to kill her. Depending on player choice, she might also be forced to slaughter the rest of her clan, who turn hostile upon discovering what has transpired. Regardless, Merrill loses her status, her mentor, and her home to her well-intentioned ambitions.
Fenris, having freed himself from slavery, nevertheless finds himself hounded by the envoys of his former master seeking to reclaim him. He winds up spending over half a decade in Kirkwall, lying in wait inside his master’s former mansion, awaiting the chance to kill him. He feels, perhaps correctly, that he will never be free so long as his master lives, and thereby shackles himself to that man’s fate. Upon finally confronting and dispatching his abuser, Fenris learns from his estranged sister that he had previously bartered for the freedom of her and her mother. That freedom, however, was “no boon.” Despite all that Fenris sacrificed for himself and his family, they’re all left feeling hollow in the end.
Sebastian Vael, an exiled nobleman turned Chantry acolyte, inevitably fails his goal to live a peaceful, pious life. He is unable to convince Grand Cleric Elthina to abandon her post, knowing that seditious mages want her dead. As such, she is killed by Anders, and Sebastian commits himself to avenging her, even if that means reclaiming his old title as the prince of Starkhaven.
Even among the antagonists, trial and suffering do not mete out justice or relief. The theft of the Tome of Koslun forces the Arishok and his qunari army to remain in Kirkwall for years, where they’re subject to discrimination, violence, and an unending showcase of the city’s (perceived) uncivilized depravity. As his patience wears thin, the Arishok becomes further trapped by his situation – unable to leave without the Tome (which had been stolen once more by Isabela), and unable to bear witness to Kirkwall’s systemic injustice any longer, his only recourse is to launch an insurrection to seize control of the city. The occupation hardly lasts long, and depending on player choices, the Arishok either winds up dead or departs with the Tome and captive Isabela… only for her to escape yet again with the artifact. Despite everything the qunari suffered in their confinement to Kirkwall, their efforts are ultimately fruitless.
Yet nobody epitomizes failure quite like the main character, Hawke. They flee with their family to Kirkwall to seek refuge from the Blight and begin a better life, only to lose one of their siblings on the way there. Once they reach the city, they discover that their family estate has been sold off, and they’re forced to sell themselves into indentured servitude to earn passage through the gates. The rest of the first act sees them preparing for an expedition to the Deep Roads to hopefully strike it rich, thereby securing safety and freedom for either themselves or their mage sister, Bethany. The plan goes awry, as their remaining sibling either dies of Blight poisoning in the Deep Roads, is saved but inducted into the Grey Wardens, or is discovered by the templars anyway. While Hawke does earn their fortune, it brings them neither peace nor safety. Their efforts to locate a serial killer end in failure (or possibly executing the wrong man). The killer courts their widowed mother, then butchers her as part of a twisted ritual to recreate his own dead lover. Instead of living in their Hightown mansion with three of their family members, Hawke is now all alone.
Things get worse when Hawke finds themselves as a pawn between parties trying to stoke fear and hatred against the qunari, provoking a crisis. Even if Hawke tries to recover the Tome of Koslun for the Arishok, they lose it Isabela, igniting the insurrection. Nevertheless, Hawke saves the city and is declared its champion. The peace doesn’t last, as Meredith’s tyranny and Anders’s terrorism reignite the flames of conflict three years later. Kirkwall once again erupts into chaos, and Hawke is powerless to stop it, despite their best efforts. They may even be partially responsible, should they unwittingly assist Anders. Meredith’s own paranoia turns out to be magnified by the red lyrium idol that Hawke and company brought back from the earlier Deep Roads expedition, further implicating them in events. War threatens to devour all of Thedas at the end of Dragon Age II, with Hawke powerlessly positioned at the center of events – and according to some, the center of blame.
“You want my advice? Did you hear what happened to Kirkwall? My advice nearly tore that city apart.”
Failure defines Hawke’s journey. In essence, they tread the inverse of the Warden’s hero’s journey. The Warden stops a war, (potentially) kills Flemeth, and puts an end to a Blighted threat. Hawke unintentionally starts a new war, resurrects Flemeth, and unleashes a new Blighted threat in the form of Corypheus – a failure which precipitates the conflict of Inquisition. I dare say there’s few RPG protagonists that fail quite as hard and quite as consistently as Hawke, and I think that’s novel. It’s borderline innovative to take the standard RPG power fantasy and turn it on its head like that, showcasing a story where a supposed grand hero struggles against external forces, only to fail over and over again. Hawke isn’t some Horatio Alger rags-to-riches caricature, whose diligence and virtue are rewarded. Rather, they’re the bitter Nathanael West-style counterpart – a humanized mockery of an RPG hero. I’ve come to appreciate Dragon Age II more when viewing it through this lens. It’s a tragedy – one where the hero puts up a valiant effort against fate, but fate keeps winning.
Augmenting this, Dragon Age II does a pretty excellent job creating an oppressive atmosphere for Kirkwall. The player can feel the weight of its bloody history, and how its past atrocities ripple across time to beget new ones. From the beginning, refugees are funneled into the city through the Gallows prison, which contains massive statues of weeping slaves from the days of the Tevinter Imperium. Impoverished citizens take up residency in former slave mines, now colloquially known as “Darktown.” There’s even a nearby quarry named the “Bone Pit” after all the slaves that perished there. Hidden codex entries even imply that Kirkwall and surrounding regions are designed to fuel a massive blood magic dynamo, self-perpetuating pain and anguish. DA2 makes the player feel small and inconsequential, simply unable to stand against the weight of this history and the mounting agony of today. At best, players score Pyrrhic victories.
Crafting an RPG around the idea of being specifically disempowering is a risky maneuver, and one that Dragon Age II can be applauded for attempting, to an extent. Because of the aforementioned faults with the game, I don’t think the risks necessarily paid off – or at the very least, the bold changes were judged very harshly on account of their imperfections. The game tailors its quest design and narrative structure around this pattern, communicating the hopeless futility to the player in a way beyond words – by taking the player’s choices, efforts, and agency and throwing them in the trash.
Though I can see more in it now, I initially left Dragon Age II frustrated and full of venom. Its attempts to convey these meanings didn’t gel with me, and by the time I rolled credits, I wanted nothing more to do with the series. I was sure that whatever came next, I simply wouldn’t care.
I had no idea how wrong I was.
Full article: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2025/03/29/your-journey-ends-a-parting-retrospective-on-dragon-age/
Your Journey Ends: A Parting Retrospective on Dragon Age (Part Four)
IV. The Abyss
I didn’t like Dragon Age II when it released in 2011. I think a lot of fans felt similarly. In recent years, it’s received something of a reappraisal, and while there are elements I appreciate more now, I find it’s still a deeply flawed, often frustrating game. Though it’s amusing to think that even in the series’s infancy, my relationship with it was complicated, to say the least. Origins set a high bar, and DA2 gave us a game that was neither what most expected nor wanted.
Developed from concept to completion in less than a year and a half, Dragon Age II became known as one of the genre’s most infamous rush jobs. Even looking at the earliest marketing materials, I could feel the roleplaying elements being downgraded. You could only play as a human now, and one with a static backstory. The entire playtime would be spent in a single city, rather than a sprawling cross-country adventure. Early ad copy encouraged players to “think like a general, fight like a Spartan” – which I found so awkwardly inappropriate and testosterone-driven that it was laughable. I quickly succumbed to a cycle of negativity (and eventual schadenfreude) as the marketing campaign progressed.
BioWare sought to isolate the Call of Duty (2003-present) audience with this title, and thereby catered the marketing and overall presentation of the game itself toward the “frat house” rather than the “treehouse”, according to executive producer and project director Mark Darrah. DA2 took Origins’s ostentatious “New Shit” and incorporated it into the text. Violence was amplified to absurd degrees, with defeated enemies exploding into bloody gibs. Action cutscenes took cues from Zack Snyder flicks, with gratuitous slow-motion shots and improbable feats of armored acrobatics (I guess the Spartan comparison was indeed referencing 2006’s 300). As for “thinking like a general”, it would have to be a commander with tunnel vision. Gone was the tactical camera, in was the “button-awesome connection.” Gone, too, was the subdued, realistic art direction of Origins in favor of a heavily stylized, comic book-inspired look (or in the case of Fenris, anime-inspired). These artistic changes, including the redesigns of the darkspawn, qunari, elves, and Flemeth would remain as permanent fixtures in the series, which I would eventually grow to accept. But at the time, it was too much change at too rapid a pace.
Upon release, I felt poised to hate much of Dragon Age II, and truth be told, I kinda did. I hated Leliana’s inexplicable survival, regardless of the imported World State. I hated the direction they took with certain characters, such as Anders and Merrill. And at all times, I gritted my teeth against this nauseating turbulence from the aggressively edgy, politically inflammatory storyline that was accompanied, by contrast, with some of the quippiest Joss Whedon-inspired dialogue that I’ve ever heard. This is a game that features the player character’s mother getting chopped up in a necromantic (emphasis on “romantic”) ritual, and contains a Sir Mix-A-Lot reference. Looking back, the combination feels somewhat unique in its discordant tonal weirdness (which is also how I’d describe the soundtrack), but the dissonance drove me nuts in the moment.
Even the most ardent defenders of Dragon Age II tend to view its gameplay as half-baked, a fault easily attributable to its short development time. The game recycles maps more than Hanna-Barbera cartoons reuse backgrounds, with almost every dungeon, be it critical path or side quest, being some iteration of Kirkwall’s one cave, single warehouse, lone dilapidated mansion. It pushes past tedium and into the realm of madness, like the player is trapped in a looping labyrinth. Combat fares no better. Most encounters amount to waves of trash mobs literally falling from the sky to be slaughtered in droves. Lazily-designed encounters yield useless loot, as you can no longer equip armor on your companions. This effectively renders more than two-thirds of the armor you pick up completely unusable, even if it’s legendary gear. Mechanics like these leave the game feeling amateurish and unpolished, especially when compared to the detailed and intricate systems of Origins.
But therein lies the issue. The more you compare DA2 to Origins, the worse it gets. While it felt like a lazy cash-grab to me back in 2011, time and hindsight have given me the chance to look past the expectations set by Origins and engage DA2 on more personal terms. I can now see some unique angles that it tries to explore – many of which arose as measures to cut time and costs, yet contain their own sparks of genuine inspiration. However, I think the frantic development and some narrative missteps undermine the potential of many of its ideas.
Dragon Age II attempts a number of feats that I’ve never seen executed before in an RPG. And having played it, I feel as though I still haven’t seen them realized. Behind every novel idea that DA2 explores, there always seems to be this frustrating asterisk, this lingering “but…” that barges in to spoil the fun. Many appreciate the game just for embracing a different formula from your typical RPG, but I’ve never been able to escape these nagging caveats that sour me on the whole experience.
As an example, the framing device of Varric’s narration allows for subjective and even exaggerated versions of events, giving the audience a chance to both question the veracity of the story as well as enjoy some over-the-top spectacle. But this opportunity is only utilized twice throughout the whole game, which otherwise plays it so straight that it’s easy to forget that the plot is being dictated and influenced through the filter of a religious interrogation.
In the same vein, DA2 cuts down on its map design by setting the whole game within the single city of Kirkwall and a few surrounding locales, opting to show how the smaller world changes over the course of years instead of showcasing a wide breadth of environs. I don’t think Kirkwall changes enough to justify this creative choice as anything beyond a cost-saving measure, though. The time jumps feel largely superfluous. One of the first choices the player makes involves selling their main character, Hawke, into indentured servitude for a year. Rather than seeing the effects of this choice play out, the game instead skips forward an entire year and progresses the plot as if nothing happened. Meanwhile, companion characters tend to pick up chats with Hawke after the triennial act breaks as if they hadn’t spoken that entire time, and immediately resume on business from where they left off.
The party’s commitment to stick together over the years generates more confusion when you consider how much some of them truly despise each other. Normally, BioWare’s colorful, bickering casts endure one another’s company for a brief period of time while they unite to face down a greater threat. In DA2’s nontraditional narrative, there is no greater threat. I appreciate the game’s attempt to tell a more personal story about struggle and loss, as opposed to the studio’s standard world-saving epic, but I also don’t think there was anything wrong with that old formula. Those reliably urgent stakes always served as a pretext to bring a bunch of people with conflicting ideals together and force them to interact. Without that angle, we run into the problem of why Fenris and Anders would possibly spend six years regularly hanging out. Consider that Anders suggests Fenris should have committed suicide and supports selling him into slavery, or that Fenris threatens to hand Anders over to the fantasy Gestapo. You see the same sort of venom between Isabela and Aveline, or just about anyone toward poor Merrill. Hawke’s quest doesn’t mandate such loyalty, especially since they effectively lose their personal motivation (escaping poverty and finding shelter against the templars for themselves/their sister) after the first act. From then on, Hawke acts as an errand runner, a reactive protagonist who mostly does things because other people show up at their house with complaints. The companions end up driving the story more than Hawke, and many DA2 fans like the story for precisely that reason. For me, it leaves it feeling rudderless and alienating in its lack of internal justification.
The emphasis on companion interactions begat another good concept with the friendship/rivalry system, wherein Hawke could develop different types of relationships with each party member. While this theoretically gives the player more freedom to express their character’s opinions honestly without trying to appease each companion to make them effective in combat, I characteristically struggled with it. The system is designed to punish neutral relationships more than competitive or even antagonistic ones, which can lead to nonsensical developments, such as Fenris trusting the player more if they are pro-mage and treat him like garbage consistently versus pro-mage players that are sympathetic to him. The former paradigm nets extreme rivalry and leads Hawke to have a strong and lasting relationship with him, whereas the latter, in which they’re personally friendly but ideologically opposed, evens out to a less-desirable neutral position, threatening his loyalty. The system also seems to demand prior knowledge of the game, as missions often reward approval points only to a few specific characters, who you may or may not have in the active party. Ultimately, I think the friendship/rivalry system is a good idea to enable players to shape the specific type of relationship they have with a character, but it’s unfortunately implemented in a way that still directs the player to pick specific patterns of responses to build points and optimize the relationship, just like your standard approval/disapproval system. It’s yet another unique aspect of Dragon Age II that upends conventional game design wisdom in order to touch upon something interesting, but never fully realizes its potential.
If DA2 has a main throughline in its plot (beyond Hawke’s misadventures with their companions), then it’s the omnipresent Mage-Templar conflict. I’m aware that this subject matter is beloved by many fans, specifically because it purports to be a nuanced or even morally ambiguous conflict. For me, it just felt repetitive by the end of the game, like the story quickly expended all the interesting ways it could portray things before settling into a looping pattern of: “templars abuse power, mages push back, templars abuse more power, mages validate templar fears by invoking blood magic and demons, templars crack down more” ad infinitum. Maybe that’s the point, that the whole thing is meant to be monotonous, but I just don’t think it’s interesting as a political metaphor. Even if we try to abstract its intermingling of civil rights and gun control arguments away from the real-life inspirations, thereby affording the text the greatest flexibility, it doubles down with uncomfortably (or laughably) unsophisticated, painfully on-the-nose references, like Ser Alrik’s “Tranquil Solution” to eliminate the mages, or Anders perpetrating fantasy 9/11 in the finale.
I mean, there aren’t that many ways to interpret this.
When the great moral dilemma of the game dilutes itself to “would you rather support the Nazis or Al Qaeda?” you might’ve lost the plot. When I see First Enchanter Orsino spontaneously swallowing up his own students in a blood magic ritual, verifying the templars’ worst fears, or templars randomly worshipping demons, or a mage chopping up women to assemble a corpse bride, or templars rendering mages Tranquil in order to sexually abuse them, I can’t consolidate any ideological message beyond “would that be fucked up or what?” In the end, it just becomes noise. You might argue that it’s highlighting the senselessness of a conflict that’s escalated out of control, but I never found its message interesting.
There are other weird plot points that I have stuck in my craw, like how Anders develops a bomb when the qunari are supposed to have a monopoly on blackpowder; or why he chose to blow up the Chantry centrists when he has access to the fascist Knight Commander Meredith’s office by the time act three rolls around; or how Meredith’s motivations are dismantled by her going crazy and superpowered under the influence of the red lyrium idol. You get my point. I, however, felt I was missing Dragon Age II’s point. At the end of the game, Varric withholds Hawke’s location from interrogator Cassandra, just as he’d done for the whole duration, making the thing feel like a shaggy dog story. While ignoring the lingering questions and plotlines from the end of Origins, DA2 introduces a whole bunch of new mysteries and leaves them similarly unresolved. I struggled to find any meaning in what I had played. While certain characters like Varric and the Arishok appealed to me (the latter loses points for a horrendous boss battle), I felt as though the series’s overall grip on me was loosening.
Returning to it over a decade later, I think I’ve developed a perverse, grudging respect for Dragon Age II. While The Veilguard would eventually go on to couch everything in therapist-speak, presented like someone strung out on benzos, Dragon Age II feels like the unbridled, unsettlingly real emotions of a manic episode. It feels like a story that its creators wanted to tell, even if it failed to connect with me. And after more reflection, it absolutely does have discernible themes – themes that, in some cases, tie into the frustrations upon which I’ve expounded.
I couldn’t help but notice how futile my efforts felt throughout Dragon Age II. Several quests present you with choices, only to later invalidate them. Examples include freeing Grace and the runaway mages, only for them to get recaptured off-screen; or the finale railroading the player into fighting both Meredith and Orsino, regardless of which side the player supported; or Anders’s bomb going off, even if you refused to help him create or plant it. The game takes pains to undo the player’s progress, strip them of their agency, and generally disempower them. And I think all of this is done with clear thematic intent.
Full article: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2025/03/29/your-journey-ends-a-parting-retrospective-on-dragon-age/
Your Journey Ends: A Parting Retrospective on Dragon Age (Part Three)
III. In Death, Sacrifice
Perhaps owing to the strengths of its roleplaying mechanics and the degree of agency afforded to the player to craft the story, Origins might be the most thematically tenuous of the first three entries. Disparate outcomes to scenarios confound most attempts to synthesize some sort of deeper meaning (if you believe in that sort of thing). However, recurrent themes, motifs, and conflicts still persist as the basis for many of the events that otherwise unfold at the player’s discretion.
Chief among these ideas is the tension between the inevitability of death and how characters go about defying it. The threat of death looms throughout Origins, as the impending Fifth Blight prepares to ravage all of Fereldan. It’s palpable as soon as you enter the village of Lothering: Death is on his way; he’s just waiting to get his travel papers stamped.
The story’s major agents are those that have contended with, or currently are contending with, their relationship with death. For some of them, the threat of death is a constant companion. Fan favorite Morrigan espouses a strict survivalist mentality, believing that the weak are not worth saving, and that a person should take advantage of every opportunity to strengthen their position in the face of a hostile world. She’s not the only one with a brutal worldview. Sten lives with the shame of losing both his sword (without which he will be slain on sight upon returning to his homeland) and his temper, having butchered an innocent family of farmers. With a disgraceful death awaiting his homecoming, he chooses to seek a more virtuous end by fighting against the Blight. Similarly, the Legion of the Dead among the dwarves holds preemptive funerals for its soldiers before marching them into the Deep Roads to face certain doom at the hands of darkspawn. The perky dwarf companion Sigrun embraces this fate, seeking to face her predetermined death head-on. Death’s allure also calls to Leliana. She danced with death regularly in her former life as a bard and spy for the Orlesian court, reveling in the mortal thrill of the fanged pageantry. However, after being betrayed and tortured, she was miraculously blessed with a second chance at life, which she uses as an opportunity to start over as a kinder, gentler soul.
Others seek to bargain with death, to avoid their fate at all costs. To save the poisoned Arl Eamon of Redcliffe, desperate son Connor conjures a demon to prolong his life. After vanquishing the fiend, the party must seek out the legendary ashes of Andraste in order to fully restore the arl to the world of the living. Not everyone needs a grail quest in order to be saved, however. Zevran Ariani, a dealer of death by profession, can be spared by his own target – thereby making him a target for his former masters. Similarly, the player can choose to spare the main antagonist, Teyrn Loghain Mac Tir, despite everything he’s done, so long as he pledges himself to the party’s service. At this point, his death itself becomes a currency – one he intends to cash in during the final battle with the Archdemon, thereby restoring some semblance of his honor.
Negotiating with death looks like child’s play next to those outright cheating it. If there’s an old wizard in Dragon Age: Origins, chances are they’re using their magic to prolong their existence. Flemeth, the infamous Witch of the Wilds, has survived centuries by stealing the bodies of her daughters. Even if the player chooses to slay her, it’s far from the last we see of her. Locked in his tower for two hundred years, Avernus maintains his body through unspeakable experiments. Zathrian of the Dalish elves has bound his life essence to a werewolf curse, allowing him to live for centuries. And Wynne, the wizened mage of the party, survives only because of a Spirit of Faith dwelling inside of her. A similar entity, Justice, props up the corpse of Grey Warden Kristoff, granting the body a second life (albeit not the soul). Among the dwarves, the need for tireless vanguards against the darkspawn prompted the smith Caridin to turn himself and others, including party member Shale, into immortal golems – souls affixed to stone bodies.
And yet, all of these examples eventually need to pay the toll. Wynne lives on borrowed time, doomed to expire at some point after the journey. Caridin will die one way or another regardless of the player’s choices. Even Flemeth would eventually meet her end – albeit, not for another two entries. With the others all potentially dying based upon player choice, Origins seems to be commenting that death cannot truly be cheated.
Which leads us to the true Death Houdini of the game: the player character, The Warden. Each of the six origin stories sees the protagonist facing death, be it the Harrowing, the Howe massacre, or the blighted Eluvian corrupting their body. The game implies that every origin story canonically occurs, but the one that the player picks just happens to be the character that Duncan rescues from certain death. Inducted into the Grey Wardens, the main character emerges as the sole survivor of the often fatal Joining ritual. Nevertheless, absorbing darkspawn corruption through the Joining destines them to a shortened lifespan, fraught by nightmares and eventual madness. After escaping death at Ostagar with fellow Warden Alistair, the two discover that they are the last remaining members of their order in the country, with the others all having perished in the battle. Repeatedly, the Warden beats the odds where so many others meet their ends. By the eve of the final battle, the Warden discovers that the only way to kill the Archdemon, which insidiously subverts death by hopping to the bodies of its underlings, is to sacrifice the life of a Grey Warden. Yet Morrigan offers the Warden an alternative, wherein they can conduct a ritual to save their life, at the price of her bearing the Archdemon’s soul as a child. At this juncture, I’m not sure which choice is more narratively satisfying. Sacrificing the Warden’s life, solemnly accepting the death that they’ve avoided until this time in order to end the conflict, seems like a perfect finale for the character, especially considering all we’ve learned about cheating death from the other examples. On the other hand, Morrigan’s own arc in Inquisition feels much more satisfying if you take her up on her bargain. But I suppose that’s the beauty of Origins – there aren’t always clear-cut answers, either on moral grounds or dramatic ones.
I believe Origins effectively utilizes the dreaded inevitability of death to highlight the struggle of life, to show that living, even for a little bit, is a blessing. It allows you to grow, meet people, and make a difference. Without the sense of impending doom, those final goodbyes at the gates of Denerim wouldn’t hit as hard. The Warden might not make it out at the end, but their repeated defiance of death, even if ultimately futile, enables them to forge meaningful relationships and live an important life.
After Origins, I couldn’t wait for what the series had in store. I eagerly anticipated the follow-up, where I expected to visit distant Orlais, find out what happened to Morrigan’s potential god-child, and uncover more truths behind the mysteries of the Blight.
I had no idea how wrong I was.
Full article: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2025/03/29/your-journey-ends-a-parting-retrospective-on-dragon-age/
Your Journey Ends: A Parting Retrospective on Dragon Age (Part Two)
II. The Threshold
Being more of a Star Wars aficionado as a kid than a pen-and-paper fan, I was first introduced to western RPGs through BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic (2003). Admittedly, I didn’t immediately grasp the mechanics (it would take years for me to understand what Armor Class or Will Save meant), but the opportunity to immerse myself in a fictional universe with a story that I could mold through dialogue exhilarated me. It was one of those special feelings that I’ve yearned to recapture for the rest of my life.
My relationship with BioWare games further blossomed with the release of 2007’s Mass Effect, the start of a series that would go on to be one of my favorites and equally as important to me as Dragon Age. While Mass Effect sought to take the roleplaying genre in a more setpiece-driven, action-oriented, cinematic space, the studio shortly thereafter released Dragon Age: Origins (2009) to cater to the more traditional RPG sensibilities: methodical pause-based tactical combat, sandbox narrative design, and your all-important +1 rings. For me, the two approaches to a modern RPG – the progressive action vs the traditional throwback – worked in harmony. I loved Origins. Even at the time of release, the whole game exuded nostalgic charm. Imagine playing it, taking in its stony interiors, crackling torches, and earthy color palette, all while the crisp autumn winds hum outside. That’s the Origins that exists in my memory.
And yet, it’s the title I have the least to say about – probably because Origins speaks for itself. Its quality as both a player co-authored story and a character-focused epic are rarely challenged, and with good reason. For its time, it was virtually unmatched in its scale and scope for roleplaying depth, being perhaps the closest approximation you could get to a tabletop Dungeons & Dragons campaign on a PC or console. In my opinion, this distinct accolade would only be unseated by Baldur’s Gate 3 in 2023, fourteen years later. That’s how long Origins dominated as the pinnacle of comprehensive roleplaying experiences.
The attention to detail and freedom afforded to the player would never be matched by any future game in the series (though I do think Origins fans have a tendency to mythologize the game and ignore the contributions and accomplishments of its successors). Take the case of Berwick. Don’t remember Berwick? I’m not surprised; he barely matters. He’s a spy for the villains that you can find in Redcliffe’s tavern. Yet despite his insignificance, the devs programmed numerous ways to interact with him: you can discover his treachery through cunning dialogue options, or through observations from the right companion combinations, or you can pickpocket him and discover a note detailing his orders. Once you’ve done that, you can confront him about it and either kill him, let him go, or conscript him into the village’s defense against an undead horde. Or you could ignore him and the town entirely, allowing it to fall to the slavering zombie maws. Most games wouldn’t give you this many options for a single quest, but Origins does it regularly. You see this pattern again with the various recruitment methods for Sten, or the different outcomes to the standoff with Ser Cauthrien, which range from a difficult boss encounter to a naked jailbreak to any combination of poorly thought-out heists by your party members. Every major quest sports branching outcomes, and even small details about your journey are remembered and referenced in dialogue. Origins gives the audience an unparalleled sense of control and reactivity in the story. More than most titles before or since, it creates a compelling illusion that it is truly your story.
On the flipside, Origins’s commitment to its hardcore RPG roots occasionally burdens it. This is perfectly summarized by playing a dwarf character during the much-maligned Fade section. The healing lyrium veins, your sole respite in this godforsaken dungeon, do not work on dwarves because they, canonically, have a resistance to the substance’s effects. Origins’s devotion to its lore and worldbuilding runs so deep that it will not sacrifice it for the player’s convenience. Aspects like this are as aggravating as they are admirable.
For all of the praises that I and others have heaped upon it, I want to emphasize that Origins is far from a perfect game. Jank, for lack of more accurate term, plagues many of its sequences and encounters. The expansion “Awakening” especially mars it, with numerous sequencing errors, narrative inconsistencies, and bugged quests. However, I mainly want to focus on what I consider the game’s few (but noteworthy) narrative and artistic shortcomings.
Fans often chide the later entries for moving away from the “dark fantasy” tone and aesthetic that Origins presented. While I do think the first game is superficially grittier than its younger siblings, I feel that Dragon Age has always been high fantasy that happened to, in its early days, insecurely masquerade in the bleak, mismatched set dressings of dark fantasy. Look no further than this actual, real trailer from 2009 that matches up a montage of gratuitous sex and violence to Marilyn Manson’s “This Is the New Shit” – a stark contrast to the game’s plodding moment-to-moment gameplay and surprisingly traditional narrative. It’s every bit as juvenile and embarrassing as it sounds, and that’s the issue. Origins feels its most adolescent when its pantomiming what a fourteen year old thinks is “adult.” It somewhat recklessly employs sexual violence against women as a plot point to a numbing degree, which doesn’t even make textual sense when the setting explicitly states that men and women are treated equally in Fereldan. If anything, women should be more privileged in this setting, since only they can be ordained as priests in the Chantry’s religious monopoly; and Orlais, the largest empire in the world, is led by an empress. But I digress. “Realistic” discriminatory violence was in vogue for the edgier sensibilities of the late 2000s, even if it lacked nuance or any semblance intratextual critique.
This key art goes really hard, though.
Origins puts up a front that tries to say, “This isn’t your dad’s D&D!” Except it is your dad’s D&D. It was a throwback to a more classical RPG style, even when it first came out – a deliberate counter-current against modern trends that skewed more toward dazzling (or obnoxious) action and spectacle. Strip away the veneer of gore and sexual violence and you’re left with a story that’s not dissimilar to The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). The Warden must unite an army of men, elves, and dwarves and restore the rightful king to the throne in order to stand against an impending horde of monstrous humanoids led by an ancient evil. It’s familiar, romantic, even comforting – a tried and true story that’s brought new life by its lively cast and interactive components. I think this is why people responded so well to Origins – not the “dark fantasy” aspects that, by and large, contribute little and have aged poorly. The inclusion of these elements don’t amount to a substantive critique on the traditional story structure and tropes at play, so the overemphasis on brutality, gore, and sex come off more as self-conscious byproducts of their time, desperate attempts to stand out as more “mature” fantasy, than genuine artistic flourishes. It isn’t Drakengard (2003) or Berserk (1989 – present) or even A Song of Ice and Fire (1996 – probably never). It’s solid as hell high fantasy in disguise.
All this is to say that I feel the series’s eventual shift to heroic fantasy with Inquisition was natural – like it was finally admitting what it always was at its core. Or at least, it was finally leaning into what it was good at.1
Yet despite my minor gripes, I think Origins manages to tell a compelling story while interweaving its themes through each character’s personal journey. While I don’t think it has the absolute strongest narrative in the series, its combination of those cozy, familiar tropes and nuanced, textured character drama makes it consistently effective. With that said, I want to delve into what I view as the core tension at the story’s center, the thematic conflict that seems to underscore almost every major dynamic throughout.
This is not to say that The Veilguard’s method of sanding off all the edges and childproofing every conceivable problematic element was an ideal solution, or even an acceptable trade-off. Rather, I merely think that the franchise has struggled with its identity since the first day. I find that the series is best when it’s at its most mature – which is neither the excessive broodmother rape/body horror from Origins nor the frictionless “coffee shop AU” vibe of The Veilguard.
Full article: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2025/03/29/your-journey-ends-a-parting-retrospective-on-dragon-age/
Your Journey Ends: A Parting Retrospective on Dragon Age (Part One)
*The following contains spoilers*
“One day, someone will summarize the terrible events of your life so quickly.”
– Flemeth, Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014)
I. The Calling
At the end of my previous essay on Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024), I alluded to the fact that I wished to return to the first threegames in the franchise to see if they still occupied the same spaces of import for me as before. In that time, BioWare’s workforce experienced even more cuts. Many of the creative leads of the Dragon Age team, including lead writer Trick Weekes, were laid off after The Veilguard failed to meet EA’s (frankly unreasonable) estimations. Former writer Sheryl Chee insisted that “DA isn’t dead because it’s yours now.” Which radiates that “farm upstate” euphemistic aura that confirms it is, in fact, dead. At the very least, I wouldn’t expect to see the franchise again in the next decade, and perhaps that’s for the best.
For all of its faults, The Veilguard wrapped up most of the major story threads. Artificially extending the series’s life might be crueler than mercifully euthanizing it. But where does that leave us? More importantly, where does that leave me? These developments definitely complicate the already difficult emotions embroiling my proposed retrospective. I’m not sure what answers I expect to find on artistic epitaphs, but there is a comfort in knowing the absolute extent of an experience – that, barring supplementary materials, these four installments represent the totality of Dragon Age’s lifespan. The absence of an unknown component makes the text feel familiar, friendly, even among parts I previously found distasteful. Death has a wondrous effect on perspective, turning the sweetness bitter and bitterness sweet. That somberness lingers, but along with it comes a previously unknown appreciation.
Having already thoroughly covered my feelings on The Veilguard, I intend to revisit each of the first three games, one at a time, and provide both an analysis of their major themes as well as a reflection of my own relationship to the works in question. The latter point is especially relevant. Dragon Age has stuck with me through the best and worst parts of my life, and my perspective on it has shifted and flipped multiple times. In order to understand its personal significance, we will need to catalog this changing relationship sequentially – and then, maybe we can determine why, after all of its faux pas and disappointments, it still matters.
Full article: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2025/03/29/your-journey-ends-a-parting-retrospective-on-dragon-age/
Dragon Age: The Veilguard: Strangled by Gentle Hands
*The following contains spoilers*
“You would risk everything you have in the hope that the future is better? What if it isn’t? What if you wake up to find the future you shaped is worse than what was?”
– Solas, Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014)
I. Whatever It Takes
My premium tickets for a local film festival crumpled and dissolved in my pants pocket, unredeemed as they swirled in the washing machine. Throughout that October weekend in 2015, I neglected my celebratory privileges, my social visits to friends, and even my brutal honors literary theory class. All because a golden opportunity stretched before me: a job opening for a writing position at the once-legendary BioWare, with an impending deadline.
The application process wasn’t like anything I’d seen before. Rather than copy+paste a cover letter and quickly swap out a couple of nouns here and there, this opening required me to demonstrate my proficiency in both words and characters – namely, BioWare’s characters. Fanfiction wasn’t normally in my wheelhouse – at the time, I had taken mainly to spinning love sonnets (with a miserable success rate). But I wouldn’t balk at this chance to work on one of my dream franchises – especially since the job prospects for fresh English BAs weren’t exactly promising. So, I got to work crafting a branching narrative based on the company’s most recent title: Dragon Age: Inquisition. Barely two months prior, I saw the conclusion of that cast’s story when the Inquisitor stabbed a knife into a map and swore to hunt her former ally, Solas, to the ends of the earth. Now it was my turn to puppeteer them, to replicate the distinct voice of each party member and account for how they’d react to the scenario I crafted. And if it went well, then maybe I’d be at the tip of the spear on that hunt for Solas. Finishing the writing sprint left me exhausted, but also proud of my work.
The folks at BioWare obviously felt differently, because I received a rejection letter less than a week later. Maybe they found my story trite and my characterization inaccurate, or maybe they just didn’t want to hire a student with no professional experience to his name. Regardless, I was devastated. It wouldn’t be until years later that I learned that, had my application been accepted, I likely would’ve been drafted into working on the studio’s ill-fated looter shooter, Anthem (2019), noteworthy for its crunch and mismanagement. My serendipitous rejection revealed that sometimes the future you strive to build was never meant to match your dreams. What seemed like an opportunity to strike oil actually turned out to be a catastrophic spill.
Still, my passion for the Dragon Age series (as well as Mass Effect) persisted in the face of BioWare’s apparent decline. I maintain that Inquisition is actually one of the studio’s best games, and my favorite in the series, to the point where I even dressed up as Cole for a convention one time. The game came to me at a very sensitive time in my life, and its themes of faith vs falsehood, the co-opting of movements in history, and the instability of power all spoke to me. But I will elaborate more on that at a later date. My point is, I held on to that hope that, in spite of everything, BioWare could eventually deliver a satisfactory resolution to the cliffhanger from their last title. Or perhaps it was less hope and more of a sunk cost fallacy, as an entire decade passed with nary a peep from Dragon Age.
As years wore on, news gradually surfaced about the troubled development of the fourth game. Beginning under the codename “Joplin” in 2015 with much of the same creative staff as its predecessors, this promising version of the game would be scrapped two years later for not being in line with Electronic Arts’s business model (i.e. not being a live-service scam). Thus, it was restarted as “Morrison”. The project cantered along in this borderline unrecognizable state for a few years until they decided to reorient it back into a single-player RPG, piling even more years of development time onto its shaky Jenga tower of production. Indeed, critical pieces were constantly being pulled out from the foundations during this ten year development cycle. Series regulars like producer Mark Darrah and director Mike Laidlaw made their departures, and the project would go on to have several more directors and producers come and go: Matthew Goldman, Christian Dailey, and Mac Walters, to name a few key figures. They eventually landed on John Epler as creative director, Corinne Busche as game director, and Benoit Houle as director of product development. Then came the massive layoffs of dozens of employees, including series-long writer Mary Kirby, whose work still made it into the final version of DA4. Finally, the game received a rebranding just four months before release, going from Dreadwolf (which it had been known as since 2022) to The Veilguard (2024) – a strange title with an even stranger article.
Needless to say, these production snags did not inspire confidence, especially considering BioWare’s been low on goodwill between a string of flops like Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017) and, before that, controversial releases like Dragon Age II (2011) and Mass Effect 3 (2012). The tumult impacted The Veilguard’s shape, which scarcely resembles an RPG anymore, let alone a Dragon Age game. The party size is reduced from four to three, companions can no longer be directly controlled, the game has shifted to a focus on action over tactics a la God of War (2018), the number of available abilities has shrunk, and there’s been a noticeable aesthetic shift towards a more cartoonish style. While I was open to the idea of changing up the combat (the series was never incredible on that front), I can’t get over the sensation that these weren’t changes conceived out of genuine inspiration, but rather vestigial traces from the live-service multiplayer iteration. The digital fossil record implies a lot. Aspects like the tier-based gear system, the instanced and segmented missions, the vapid party approval system, the deficit of World State import options, and the fact that rarely does more than the single mandatory companion have anything unique to say on a quest – it all points to an initial design with a very different structure from your typical single-player RPG. The Veilguard resembles a Sonic Drive-In with a mysterious interior dining area – you can tell it was originally conceived as something else.1
That said, the product itself is functional. It contains fewer bugs than any previous game in the franchise, and maybe BioWare’s entire catalog for that matter. I wouldn’t say the combat soars, but it does glide. There’s a momentum and responsiveness to the battle system that makes it satisfying to pull off combos and takedowns against enemies, especially if you’re juggling multiple foes at once. Monotony sets in after about thirty or forty hours, largely due to the fact that you’re restricted to a single class’s moveset on account of the uncontrollable companions. Still, this design choice can encourage replay value, as it does in Mass Effect, and free respec options and generous skill point allocations offset the tedium somewhat.
While the character and creature designs elicit controversy – both for the exaggerated art direction and, in the case of demons and darkspawn, total redesign – the environmental art is nothing short of breathtaking. I worried that this title would look dated because of how long it had been in development and the age of the technology it was built upon. Those fears were swiftly banished when I saw the cityscapes of Minrathous, the cyclopean architecture of the Nevarran Grand Necropolis, or the overgrown ruins of Arlathan. But like everything in The Veilguard, it’s a double-edged sword. The neon-illuminated streets of Docktown, the floating citadel of the Archon’s Palace, and the whirring mechanisms of the elven ruins evoke a more fantastically futuristic setting that feels at odds with all three previous titles (even though all three exhibited a stylistic shift to some extent). It aggravates the feeling of discordance between this rendition of Thedas and the one returning players know.
All of these elements make The Veilguard a fine fantasy action-adventure game – even a good one, I’d say. But as both the culmination of fifteen years of storytelling and as a narrative-based roleplaying game – the two most important facets of its identity – it consistently falls short. Dragon Age began as a series with outdated visuals and often obtuse gameplay, but was borne aloft by its worldbuilding, characterization, and dialogue. Now, that paradigm is completely inverted. The more you compare it to the older entries, the more alien it appears. After all these years of anticipation, how did it end up this way? Was this the only path forward?
Throughout The Veilguard’s final act, characters utter the phrase “Whatever it takes,” multiple times. Some might say too many. I feel like this mantra applied to the development cycle. As more struggles mounted, the team made compromise after compromise to allow the game to exist at all, to give the overarching story some conclusion in the face of pressure from corporate shareholders, AAA market expectations, and impatient fans. Whatever it takes to get this product out the door and into people’s homes.
This resulted in a game that was frankensteined together, assembled out of spare parts and broken dreams. It doesn’t live up to either the comedic heights or dramatic gravity of Inquisition’s “Trespasser” DLC from 2015, despite boasting the same lead writer in Trick Weekes. Amid the disappointment, we’re left with an unfortunate ultimatum: It’s either this or nothing.
I don’t mean that as a way to shield The Veilguard from criticism, or to dismiss legitimate complaints as ungrateful gripes. Rather, I’m weighing the value of a disappointing reality vs an idealized fantasy. The “nothing”, in this sense, was the dream I had for the past decade of what a perfect Dragon Age 4 looked like. With the game finally released, every longtime fan has lost their individualized, imaginary perfection in the face of an authentic, imperfect text. Was the destruction of those fantasies a worthy trade? It doesn’t help that the official artbook showcases a separate reality that could’ve been, with a significant portion dedicated to the original concepts for Joplin that are, personally, a lot closer to my ideal vision. I think it would’ve done wonders to ground the game as more Dragon Age-y had they stuck with bringing back legacy characters, such as Cole, Calpernia, Imshael, and the qunari-formerly-known as Sten.
I don’t necessarily hate The Veilguard (I might actually prefer it to Dragon Age II), but I can’t help but notice a pattern in its many problems – a pattern that stems from a lack of faith in the audience and a smothering commitment to safety over boldness. As I examine its narrative and roleplaying nuances, I wish to avoid comparing it to groundbreaking RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023) or even Dragon Age: Origins (2009), as the series has long been diverging from that type of old-school CRPG. Rather, except when absolutely necessary, I will only qualitatively compare it to Inquisition, its closest relative.
And nowhere does it come up shorter to Inquisition than in the agency (or lack thereof) bestowed to the player to influence their character and World State.
II. Damnatio Memoriae
No, that’s not the name of an Antivan Crow (though I wouldn’t blame you for thinking so, since we have a character named “Lucanis Dellamorte”). It’s a Latin phrase meaning “condemnation of memory”, applied to a reviled person by destroying records of their existence and defacing objects of their legacy. In this case, it refers to the player. When it comes to their influence over the world and their in-game avatar, The Veilguard deigns to limit or outright eliminate it.
Save transfers that allow for the transmission of World States (the carrying over of choices from the previous games) have been a staple of the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises. Even when their consequences are slight, the psychological effect that this personalization has on players is profound, and one of many reasons why fans grow so attached to the characters and world. At its core, it’s an illusion, but one that’s of similar importance to the illusion that an arbitrary collection of 1s and 0s can create an entire digital world. Player co-authorship guarantees a level of emotional investment that eclipses pre-built backgrounds.
However, The Veilguard limits the scope to just three choices, a dramatic decrease from the former standard. All import options come from Inquisition, with two just from the “Trespasser” expansion. One variable potentially impacts the ending, while the other two, in most cases, add one or two lines of dialogue and a single codex entry. Inquisition, by contrast, imported a bevy of choices from both previous games. Some of them had major consequences to quests such as “Here Lies the Abyss” and “The Final Piece”, both of which incorporated data from two games prior. The Veilguard is decidedly less ambitious. Conspicuously absent options include: whether Morrigan has a child or not, the fate of Hawke, the status of the Hero of Fereldan, the current monarchs of Fereldan and Orlais, the current Divine of the southern Chantry, and the individual outcomes of more than two dozen beloved party members across the series. Consequently, the fourth installment awkwardly writes around these subjects – Varric avoids mentioning his best friend, Hawke, as does Isabela ignore her potential lover. Fereldan, Orlais, and the Chantry are headed by Nobody in Particular. Morrigan, a prominent figure in the latest game, makes no mention of her potential son or even her former traveling companions. And the absence of many previous heroes, even ones with personal stakes in the story, feels palpably unnatural. I suspect this flattening of World States into a uniform mold served, in addition to cutting costs, to create parity between multiple cooperative players during the initial live-service version of Morrison. Again, the compromises of the troubled production become apparent, except this time, they’re taking a bite out of the core narrative.
Moreover, the game’s unwillingness to acknowledge quantum character states means that it’s obliged to omit several important cast members. At this point, I would’ve rather had them establish an official canon for the series rather than leaving everything as nebulous and undefined as possible. That way at least the world would’ve felt more alive, and we could’ve gotten more action out of relevant figures like Cassandra, Alistair, Fenris, Merrill, Cole, and Iron Bull. Not to mention that The Veilguard’s half-measure of respectful non-intereference in past World States ultimately fails. Certain conversations unintentionally canonize specific events, including references to Thom Rainier and Sera, both of whom could go unrecruited in Inquisition, as well as Morrigan’s transformation into a dragon in the battle with Corypheus in that game’s finale. But whatever personal history the player had with them doesn’t matter. The entire Dragon Age setting now drifts in a sea of ambiguity, its history obfuscated. It feels as gray and purgatorial as Solas’s prison for the gods.
Beyond obscuring the past, The Veilguard restrains the player’s agency over the present. When publications first announced that the game would allow audiences to roleplay transgender identities and have that acknowledged by the party, I grew very excited – both at the encouraging representation, and at the depth of roleplaying mechanics that such an inclusion suggested. Unfortunately, The Veilguard offers little in roleplaying beyond this. The player character, Rook, always manifests as an altruistic, determined, friendly hero, no matter what the player chooses (if they’re offered choices at all). The selections of gender identity and romantic partner constitute the totality of how Rook defines themselves, post-character creation – exceptions that prove the rule of vacancy. Everything else is set in stone. The options presented are good, and should remain as standard, but in the absence of other substantive roleplaying experiences, their inclusion starts to feel frustratingly disingenuous and hollow, as if they were the only aspects the developers were willing to implement, and only out of obligation to meet the bare minimum for player agency. In my opinion, it sours the feature and exudes a miasma of cynicism.
Actual decisions that impact the plot are few and far between, but at least we have plenty of dialogue trees. In this type of game, dialogue options might usually lead to diverging paths that eventually converge to progress the plot. You might be choosing between three different flavors of saying “yes”, but as with the World States, that illusion of agency is imperative for the roleplaying experience. The Veilguard doesn’t even give you the three flavors – the encouraging, humorous, and stern dialogue options are frequently interchangeable, and rarely does it ever feel like the player is allowed to influence Rook’s reactions. Relationships with companions feel predetermined, as the approval system has no bearing on your interactions anymore. There are so few moments for you to ask your companions questions and dig in deep compared to Inquisition. Combined together, these issues make me question why we even have dialogue with our party at all. Rook adopts the same parental affect with each grown adult under their command, and it feels like every conversation ends the same way irrespective of the player’s input. With the exception of the flirting opportunities, they might as well be non-interactive cutscenes.
Rook’s weak characterization drags the game down significantly. With such limited authorship afforded to the player, it’s difficult to regard them as anything more than their eponymous chess piece – a straightfoward tool, locked on a grid, and moving flatly along the surface as directed.
III. Dull in Docktown
On paper, a plot summary of The Veilguard sounds somewhere between serviceable and phenomenal: Rook and Varric track down Solas to stop him from tearing down the Veil and destroying the world. In the process, they accidentally unleash Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain, two of the wicked Evanuris who once ruled over the elven people millenia ago. With Solas advising them from an astral prison, Rook gathers a party together to defeat the risen gods, along with their servants and sycophants. Over the course of the adventure, they uncover dark truths about the origins of the elves, the mysterious Titans, and the malevolent Blight that’s served as an overarching antagonistic force. Eventually, Rook and friends join forces with Morrigan and the Inquisitor, rally armies to face off with their foes, and slay both the gods and their Archdemon thralls before they can conjure the full terror of the Blight. As Solas once again betrays the group, Rook and company have to put a decisive stop to his plans, which could potentially involve finally showing him the error of his ways.
The bones of The Veilguard’s story are sturdier than a calcium golem. Problems arise when you look at the actual writing, dialogue, and characterization – the flesh, blood, and organs of the work.
I’ve seen others chide the writing as overly quippy, but that better describes previous titles. Rather, I think The Veilguard’s dialogue is excessively utilitarian and preliminary, like a first draft awaiting refinement. Characters describe precisely what’s happening on screen as it’s happening, dryly exposit upon present circumstances, and repeat the same information ad nauseum. This infuriating repetition does little to reveal hidden components of their personalities, or their unique responses to situations. You won’t hear anything like Cole’s cerebral magnetic poetry or Vivienne’s dismissive arrogance. Many exchanges could’ve been uttered by Nobody in Particular, as it’s just dry recitation after recitation. It almost feels like watching an English second language instructional video, or a demonstration on workplace safety precautions. Clarity and coherence come at the cost of characterization and charisma.
Words alone fail to make them interesting. Most companions lack the subtlety and depth I had come to expect from the franchise, with many conversations amounting to them just plainly stating how they’re feeling. Most rap sessions sound like they’re happening in a therapist’s office with how gentle, open, and uncomplicated they feel. Compare this to Inquisition, where every character has a distinct voice (I should know, I had to try to copy them for that stupid application), as well as their own personal demons that it betrays: Sera’s internalized racism, hints of Blackwall’s stolen valor, Iron Bull’s espionage masked by bluster, or Solas’s lingering guilt and yearning for a bygone age. These aspects of their characters aren’t front and center, but things the audience can delve into that gives every moment with them more texture. The Veilguard’s companions lay out all their baggage carefullly and respectfully upfront, whether it’s Taash’s multiculturalism and gender identity issues or Neve’s brooding cynicism towards Tevinter’s underbelly. You’ve plumbed the depths of their personas within the first few minutes of meeting most of them.
Small exceptions exist. Professor Emmerich Volkarin stands out from the rest of the cast as a particularly inspired character: a charming, Vincent Price-like necromancer. His attachment to tombs and necromancy as a way to cope with his crippling fear of death makes for curiously compelling melodrama. The way in which he ultimately has to face his fear – either by foregoing his opportunity for immortality to save his beloved skeletal ward, Manfred, or by allowing his friend to pass on so that he can transcend into a new type existence – rises above the other binary choices in the game by being both narratively interesting and legitimately difficult to judge. Still, I feel Emmerich’s whole “lawful good gentleman necromancer” conceit, while a unique and clever subversion of tropes, would’ve worked better if it actually contrasted with anyone else in the party. Instead, the whole crew is full of unproblematic do-gooders who are forbidden by the game to nurture any meaningful interpersonal conflict. While I’d appreciate this lack of toxicity in my real-life relationships, fictional chemistry demands more reactive ingredients.
The Veilguard’s developers frequently positioned the game as “cozy” and about a “found family”, but I can guarantee you that there’s more tension at my Thanksgiving dinners than there is anywhere in this title. This family would get along swimmingly even during a presidential election. The thing about the “found family” trope is that it’s more satisfying when it’s earned. Here, it represents the default state, the starting point, and the status quo that they will always return to. Any minor squabbles (Harding wanting to sleep in the dirt, Emmerich taking too many books on a camping trip, Taash not liking necromancy) are introduced and squashed within the same scene. They all feel so extraneous. There’s so little friction among the companions here that you’d think it disproves Newton’s Third Law. The previous games never struggled in this regard, which makes the choices here all the more baffling.
Beyond the intra-party dynamics, characters lack grit or darkness to them – even when the narrative absolutely calls for it. Remember how I described the necromancer as lawful good (to use traditional Dungeons and Dragons alignments)? Yeah, that’s every character. Even the demonic assassin. Lucanis is a notorious hitman possessed by a demon of Spite, and possibly the weakest character of the game. This may or may not be due to the fact that his writer, Mary Kirby, was laid off mid-development. Regardless, he has noticeably less content than the other party members and generally feels unfinished. The demonic possession storyline goes nowhere; he doesn’t exorcise Spite, nor does he learn more about it or how to live with it. Instead, Spite is just an excuse to give Lucanis cool spectral wings (which he will use to fail several assassination attempts). The demon itself mostly just comes across as rude rather than threatening. The biggest issue, however, stems from the absence of any edge to Lucanis. When confronting his traitorous cousin, Ilario – the man who sold out Lucanis’s family to an enemy faction, kidnapped his grandmother, and made multiple attempts on his life – our grizzled, hardened assassin, pushed to the brink, demands… due process. Seriously, if your choices have led Lucanis to have a hardened heart, his method for dealing with the grievous traitor is sending him to jail. That’s The Veilguard’s idea of vindictive brutality among a clan of unforgiving murderers-for-hire. By contrast, Inquisition features Sera insubordinately murdering a stuck-up nobleman for talking too much. I believe that if modern BioWare had written The Godfather (1972), it would’ve ended with Michael Corleone recommending his brother-in-law to attend confession and seek a marriage counselor.
The writers seem intent on making the cast wholly unproblematic, with no way that the audience could ever question their morality or taste the delicious nuance of seeing someone you like do something bad. Measures were taken to child-proof every aspect of the good guys so that they couldn’t possibly be construed as anything else – even if it constricts them to the point of numbness and eventual atrophy.
To make things as palatable and accessible as possible, the language itself was dumbed down. Characters make frequent use of neologisms and bark phrases like “Suit up,” or “These guys go hard.” It emulates popular blockbuster superhero stuff rather than staying true to the diction the series traditionally employed. It’s all about the team, and the entire Dragon Age world has been stripped down into simplistic conflicts and recognizable stock characters.
This is why The Veilguard’s story largely fails. Despite being ostensibly being about the characters, they come off as an afterthought. Most of the time, only the sole requisite follower has anything to say on a given mission. Even in combat, their wholeness as fully-implemented party members falls short of expectations. Their damage output pales in comparison to the Rook’s, they have no health and cannot be downed in battle, and they mainly exist to give the player three extra ability slots. That’s the game’s true ethos for the companions, whether in combat or dialogue – utility, tools to make things happen rather than elegantly crafted identities. We end up with the largest amount of content per companion among any game in the franchise, only to have the weakest roster.
I know these writers can do better, because I’ve seen them do better. Trick Weekes wrote Iron Bull, Cole, and Solas in Inquisition, as well as Mordin Solus and Tali’Zorah in Mass Effect 2 (2010) and Mass Effect 3. Mary Kirby wrote Varric throughout the series, as well as Sten and Loghain in Origins. Plenty of other experienced writers, such as Sylvia Feketekuty and John Dombrow also contributed, so I can’t put any of the blame on a lack of skill. I don’t know if the mistake was trying to appeal to a wider audience, or if the constant reorientations of the DA4 project drained the crew’s passion and left them lacking in time to polish things.
I personally suspect that the writers had to rush out a script for all of the voiced dialogue. A video from August of 2020 showed off the voice actors for Davrin and Bellara, more than four years before the final game’s release. I think the codex entries, letters, and missives that you find throughout the game, which consist of only text, are much better written than the dialogue. My theory is that the writers had more time to revise and spruce up these tidbits, where edits were minimally invasive, as far as production is concerned. But my knowledge is limited; after all, BioWare rejected my application almost a decade ago.
Still, there are aspects of The Veilguard’s plot that I enjoy. The lore reveals were particularly satisfying2, and many felt rewarding after a decade of speculation. I called that elves were originally spirits, as well as the connection between the Archdemons and the Evanuris, but I wouldn’t have guessed that the Blight formed out of the smoldering rage of the Titans’ severed dreams. I’d concisely describe The Veilguard’s story as the opposite of Mass Effect 3: Whereas ME3 did excellent character work, the characterization in The Veilguard leaves much to be desired. Whereas ME3’s tone was overwhelmingly grim, The Veilguard feels inappropriately positive. Whereas ME3’s lore reveals ruined much about the series’s mystique, The Veilguard’s helped tie the setting’s history together. And whereas ME3 fumbled the ending about as much as it possibly could, The Veilguard actually coalesces into a spectacular third act.
While I think the twist with Varric’s death is weak (outright pitiful compared to the Dread Wolf twist of Inquisition), the actual events that make up the finale carry a momentum and urgency that the rest of the game severely lacked. Everything from the sacrifice and kidnapping of Rook’s companions to the slaying of Ghilan’nain to the awe-inspiring battle between the Dread Wolf and Archdemon Lusacan – the whole affair takes the best parts of Mass Effect 2’s Suicide Mission and elevates it to the scale of an apocalyptic series finale. Ultimately, Solas takes center stage as the final antagonist, and the drama crescendos to a height the rest of the game desperately needed. He remains the most interesting character in the game and perhaps the franchise, and thankfully, the resolution to his story did not disappoint me (though I would’ve preferred the option for a boss battle against his Dread Wolf form if the player’s negotiations broke down). So in that sense, I think the worst possible scenario was avoided.
But is that really worth celebrating? Averting complete disaster? Exceeding the lowest standards? In many regards, The Veilguard still could have been – should have been – more.
IV. A World of Tranquil
In my essay on Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth (2024), I briefly discussed a trend in media to sand off the edges so as not to upset the audience in any way. The encroachment of this media sanitization seems to be an over-correction to the brimming grimness of late 2000s and early 2010s fiction (to which the first two Dragon Age titles belong), which earned comparable levels of criticism. Like Solas, I occasionally feel trapped in a cycle of regret, where it feels like our previous yearning for less aggressive, mean-spirited content led to a media landscape that prioritized patronizingly positive art. Now it’s clear to me that, in order to have a point, you need to have an edge.
Dragon Age historically drew a very progressive audience, and many of them congregated around Tumblr in that website’s heyday. Tumblr has garnered something of a reputation for overzealous discourse and sensitivity among its userbase, and I think that the developers of The Veilguard, in an attempt to cater to one of their core audiences, may have misunderstood both that passion and the fundamental appeal of their products. They became so concerned about optics, about avoiding politically charged criticism, that they kneecapped their world-building, rendering it as inoffensive and sterile as possible. It’s not so much “PC culture” as it is “PG culture.”
To that end, the various governments, factions, and societies of Thedas lost their edge. Dragon Age previously presented itself as anti-authoritarian by showcasing the rampant abuses of power across all cultures. Whether it was the incarceration of mages under the Chantry, the slavery practiced by the Tevinter Imperium, the expansionist anti-individualism of the Qun, the restrictive dwarven caste system, or the rampant racism against elves, social strife abounded in this world. I think that’s one thing that drew so many marginalized fans to the series. But the correlation of fictional atrocities with those of real life frequently prompted volatile discourse, with many concerned about how allegedly allegorized groups were being represented. You began to see countless essays pop up by folks who use the phrase “blood quantum” more than any healthy person should for a setting about wizards. BioWare responded to this by making Thedosian society wholly pleasant and the people in power responsible and cool and the disparate cultures tolerant and cooperative. If nothing’s portrayed negatively (outside of the cartoonishly evil gods), nobody can take offense, right?
For starters, the Antivan Crows have gone from an amoral group of assassins to basically Batman. These figures, which previously purchased children off slave markets to train them into killers, are now the “true rulers” of Antiva, by which the official government derives its authority. The Crows in The Veilguard stand against the insurgent qunari army as heroes of the common folk. They’re not an unscrupulous faction that Rook is reluctantly forced to ally with for the greater good; no, the Crows are simply good guys now. When the pompous governor of Treviso rails against them, with such audacious claims as “assassins and thugs should not represent the citizenry,” we’re meant to laugh at the governor’s foolishness. The unintentional implication this sends is that lethal vigilantism and unchecked power are cool because the people who use it are cool and stylish. The slave trade goes unacknoweldged; Antivan children want to grow up to be assassins now. The Crows never do anything wrong in The Veilguard – the governor is later revealed to be cooperating with the invaders for their own power. BioWare avoids the unpleasantness inherent in the Crows’ concept by pretending it never existed.
Perhaps more ridiculous is the Lords of Fortune, a new faction of pirates and treasure hunters based out of Rivain. Except they don’t really do piracy or treasure hunting. The game goes to lengths to ensure that the audience knows that the Lords don’t steal important cultural artifacts from any of the tombs and ruins they raid. What do they steal, then? There is no such thing as an ethical treasure hunter – plundering indigenous sites for souvenirs is inherently problematic – but the writers wanted to reap the appeal of adventurous swashbucklers without any of the baggage, regardless of whether it makes sense or not3. It comes across as a child’s idea of a pirate: they’re not thinking about the murder and looting, just the funny men with eye-patches who say “ARRR!” The developers want us to like the Lords of Fortune, and to that end, they can’t do anything culturally insensitive – even fictional disrespect toward a made-up culture. This is doubly amusing because the Lords are represented by Isabela from Dragon Age II. The same Isabela that kicked off a war with the qunari by stealing their holy book, the Tome of Koslun. This irony goes unacknowledged by the game.4
When these rogue buccaneers aren’t busy giving land acknowledgments to displaced Dalish elves or whatever, they’re enjoying their nonviolent coliseum. Pirates revel in bloodsport, but only so long as no actual blood is spilled. The Lords refuse to fight prisoners or animals in their arena, as they find such acts too cruel. I guess they’re all big Peter Singer readers. Instead, they summon spirits to adopt the visages of common enemies so that the player can kill them with a clean conscience. It’s another example of wanting to have your cake and eat it too – they wanted to create a glory hunter/gladiator faction, but couldn’t stand the underlying implications of such. So they twisted and bent them to fit into their unproblematic paradigm, leaving the Lords flavorless and lame. They barely even contribute to the main story, and they’re practically the only look we get into Rivaini society (which remains criminally underdeveloped).
More tragic is the handling of the qunari, once one of the most unique and nuanced civilizations in the Dragon Age setting. The Qun, as portrayed in the first three installments, is a society that demands all of its composite parts work in harmony. Thus, they have predetermined vocations for their children, rigid gender roles, strict codes of conduct, and an ambition to “enlighten” the rest of the world. While the Qun has often been presented as antagonistic toward the heroes, the series has commonly balanced its portrayal by showing how seductive its absolutism can be for people without hope. In some cases, life under the Qun is preferable, as is the case with former Tevinter slaves. Conformity becomes comfort when the world is regularly threatening to split apart.
The Veilguard opts for a different approach. See, Rook’s not fighting members of the Qun in this game – they’re fighting the Antaam, the former qunari military. The Veilguard constantly reiterates that the Antaam, which makes up one of the three branches of the Qun, has broken off and decided to invade, pillage, and stoke chaos. BioWare didn’t want the questionable morality and complexity of fighting an invading people from a humanized, multi-faceted culture, so they removed their culture. Their efforts to turn the non-Western-coded qunari into something digestible for their mistaken conception of a modern audience instead results in two caricatures: one being a fetishized, perfect society where there are no perceivable social ills; and the other a bunch of rampaging brutes.
Contending with a realized conception of Plato’s Republic mixed with the Ottoman Empire makes for more compelling drama than a horde of murderous giants. Again, BioWare wanted to have it both ways, and they still needed nameless, faceless orcs to kill. So every bit about the qunari’s militancy, imperialism, and repression coexisting alongside some of their more progressive ideas and communal unity is stripped of its context and meaning. Blame is placed solely on the Antaam, who no longer represent (and retroactively, never represented) the Qun’s ideology. It’s a cowardly compromise, attempting to pin the blame of all the Qun’s failings on a renegade military and seeking to exonerate the political and social apparatuses of their culpability.
At one point, a minor character named Seer Rowan lectures to an ignorant human (a proxy for the audience absorbing these retcons) that qunari society has always been egalitarian in practice, with mages enjoying freedom there. Previous games showed that the qunari shackle their “saarebas” mages, stitch their mouths, cut out their tongues, and teach them to commit suicide if they ever stray from their masters. However, we’re now assured that this is only practiced under the Antaam, and No True Qunari would ever do such a thing. Ignore the fact that, in Inquisition, we witness the enslaved saarebas under the supervision of the Ben-Hasserath, a subdivision of the Ariqun (i.e. not part of the Antaam). In fact, the Antaam that Rook fights in The Veilguard never command saarebas at all. They’re completely absent from the game (likely because the image of the bound, mutilated minority was too much for The Veilguard’s sensibilities). Seer Rowan’s weak, conciliatory retcon can’t even justify itself in its own game. The scolding diatribe communicates an intrinsic misunderstanding of the Qun by the writers – namely, it continues the pattern established with the Antivan Crows that the mechanics of power in society are fundamentally good as long as aberrant forces aren’t in charge.
While I understand the desire to be conscientious about the portrayal of fictional cultures that draw upon non-Western traditions and iconography (which have historically been demonized in media), glamorizing the Qun and stripping it of its realistic nuance does little to alleviate any problems with representation. If anything, it creates new ones.
But hey, now we have our faceless orcs to guiltlessly slaughter. That’s what the Antaam’s been reduced to, bereft of the ideology that made them people. We kill them because they’re strange and scary and foreign and seeking to destroy our cities for fun. They remain the most prominent representation of the qunari in-game, barring our party member Taash. BioWare’s attempts to reverse what they viewed as problematic components to the qunari instead devolved into the very tropes they wished to avoid.
Which leads us to the elves. Much of the series’s discourse has surrounded the portrayal of the long-suffering elven people, who endure slavery under Tevinter, expulsion from their homeland in the Dales, confinement in ghettos, and the general disdain from other races. The games’ stories use symbolic shorthand of real-life oppressed peoples to communicate these tragedies, and this has led to a variety of intense, emotional interpretations over the years. The unending misery of the systematically marginalized elves hasn’t gone unnoticed by the fanbase – and their criticisms haven’t gone unnoticed by the developers. To quote The Veilguard’s creative director, John Epler, in an interview with Polygon:
“Dragon Age has not always been the kindest to the Dalish [elves]. Somebody once made a joke to me, and it’s not untrue, that it’s possible to wipe out a Dalish clan in all three of the games in some way.”
He and others on the development team must’ve thought elves needed a break, because the omnipresent racism against them vanishes completely in The Veilguard. Tevinter, an empire built on the back of chattel slavery, doesn’t show any of that. Consequently, it feels like players in the know still haven’t seen the true face of Tevinter, despite spending half a game there. The notion that the capital of Minrathous gives now is one of a prosperous city that’s centuries ahead of the countries down south, rather than a cruel regime cracking the whip at every opportunity. Perhaps the writers weren’t comfortable portraying this, or felt that their audience might not be amenable to it after years of incendiary argumentation. Nevertheless, it castrates their established world-building and robs us of the opportunity to witness true elven liberation in the climax. With both the fall of Minrathous and the toppling of the tyrannical elven gods, we could have delivered a much needed catharsis after four games of oppression, but The Veilguard forgoes this storytelling opportunity to play it safe.
I worry that this hesitancy originated from anxieties about the sensitivity of depicting marginalized peoples in brutal, dehumanizing conditions, and how that might look to more fragile viewers. But I think it’s important for all players, watchers, and readers to know that, though there might be aspects shared between them, fictional minorities are distinct from real ones.
Dragon Age’s elves are aesthetically Celtic. Their residency in alienages evokes images of Disapora Jews in Europe. Their Long Walk after being driven from the Dales calls back to the Trail of Tears, sharing an experience with Native Americans. Their subsequent migratory nature is reminiscent of the Romani people. And their ancient empire of Arlathan, with its large columns and temples of worship, headed by ascended humanoid (for lack of a better term) deities that cast down an enemy called the Titans, and which has since had its religion and culture co-opted and renamed by Roman-inspired Tevinter invites comparisons to classical Greece.
My point is, the elves of Dragon Age don’t represent one group of people, because fictional cultures are constructs drawing from countless inspirations. If they represent anything beyond themselves, it’s the idea of a proud people that’s fallen under the yoke of conquering powers – a supervictim to embody all. The idea that one must be limited in their storytelling options based on how the portrayal might reflect upon or disrespect an existing culture is flawed, in my opinion. In the overwhelming majority of cases, coding cannot be read as a 1:1 allegory, especially in speculative fiction like science-fiction and fantasy. I believe the most mature way to evaluate a story isn’t to try to pigeonhole what it’s trying to say say about who, as if there’s some insidious encrypted message in the text. Rather, it’s to see the forest through the trees and interpret the work as a complete whole in itself.
On that basis, I ask: would it have been so bad to see some of those enslaved elves, praying for salvation, side with their manipulative, nefarious gods? To add some nuance to the conflict with Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain, would the story of elven liberation not have been better if the game actually engaged with it? Could we actually have a moral quandary with those whom Rook ends up fighting, even if the content might be seemingly problematic?
Epler might respond in the negative, per the Polygon interview, claiming that the gods “simply don’t care” about the elves.
“Those blighted, decrepit gods, they’re not bothering with the soft pitch. Their pitch is, We’re going to make a horrible world. We’re going to give you a lot of power, and maybe you’ll be OK.”
Like a chess board, the core conflict of The Veilguard is black and white. BioWare abandoned the chance to make Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain more interesting villains because it was too risky.
Similarly risky was Solas’s role as an antagonist, since his motivations, as explained in “Trespasser”, are deeply sympathetic. Perhaps too much so for the developers’ comfort. Unlike the Evanuris and their disinterest in the elves, Solas wants to restore the elven people to their former glory. At least, that seemed to be his pitch in the last game. Frustratingly absent from The Veilguard are the Agents of Fen’Harel – elves who swore fealty to Solas’s cause. They infiltrated and compromised the Inquisition, effectively precipitating the final decision to end the organization in its current form. The idea that Solas had amassed an army of common folk who found the idea of a renewed elven empire appealing made him appear formidable and intimidating. “Trespasser” implies that a mass uprising of elves under Solas’s leadership was imminent, and anyone could be in on it.
None of this happens in The Veilguard. Not only does Solas lack an army, but their absence isn’t explained or even acknowledged. As a result, Solas remains a passive antagonist until near the end, since the player has no disciples of his to contend with (either physically or ideologically) along the way. It wastes a side of his character that had been foreshadowed in a decade-long cliffhanger – that of a charismatic leader, capable of coordinating a rebellion that could spell disaster for its own followers.
In a Reddit AMA after the latest game’s release, Epler answered where the Agents of Fen’Harel disappeared to:
“Solas’ experience leading the rebellion against the Evanuris turned him against the idea of being a leader. You see it in the memories – the entire experience of being in charge ate at him and, ultimately, convinced him he needed to do this on his own. And his own motivations were very different from the motivations of those who wanted to follow him – he had no real regard for their lives or their goals. So at some point between Trespasser and DATV, he severed that connection with his ‘followers’ and went back to being a lone wolf. There are Dalish clans who are sympathetic to his goals, but even there, there’s an understanding that he’s too dangerous to have a more formal connection with, and that he will, ultimately, sacrifice them to his own ends if necessary.”
I find this explanation unsatisfying, not the least bit because the narrative offers next to nothing to imply this. The disappearance of Solas’s agents represents my biggest bugbear with the game, depriving it of the full potential of its highly anticipated antagonist in favor of the more generically villainous Evanuris. Moreover, this omission fits into the aggravating blueprint for The Veilguard’s inoffensive direction. The motivations, emotions, and backgrounds of the Agents of Fen’Harel would be sympathetic, and therefore might problematize the otherwise cut-and-dry conflicts. Epler seemed concerned that audiences might think Solas was “a little too sympathetic in his goals,” according to an interview with GamesRadar+.
But that’s the thing: sympathy isn’t endorsement, and portrayal of sympathetic characters isn’t endorsement either. But neither does that invalidate the emotions and experiences that generate that sympathy, even if the character’s actions ultimately turn toward evil. I’ve noticed a trend (especially in symptomatic criticism, which I generally dislike5) to view art as propaganda, and to evaluate it from a moralizing, top-down perspective. Antagonists with complex or understandable motivations (in this case, revolutionary villains) are often judged by this framework as tools for stories wishing to champion the status quo. Common arguments that I’ve seen imply that the relatability that we often find in villains is not a strength of the writing, but a devilish trick of ideology by which writers can reinforce conservative doctrine, to scold us away from certain beliefs. Any decent writer knows this isn’t the case, and that people don’t write morally or emotionally complex antagonists for didactic purposes. Instead, characters such as these embody the anxieties of their creators – the fear of losing yourself to your passions, the fear of going about things the wrong way, the fear of sacrificing too much to achieve your desired ends. The concepts and feelings that compel these characters remain authentic to the writer’s heart and the connection they established with the audience.
Art isn’t propaganda. To read it as such reduces it and promotes intellectual dishonesty and foolhardy myopia. Stories are irreducible (otherwise, we would not waste our time with them), and so I believe interpretations should be formed from the bottom-up, rooted in the text as much as possible. The “message” cannot be imposed from the top-down, but symptomatic readings, in their focus on tropes and cultural context, frequently condemn without a trial. Hindering your story in order to future-proof it for the sake of optics is a safeguard against this, and one that leads to bad stories. Artists should have confidence that their text will hold its ground on its own. To quote Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “A Message about Messages”:
“The complex meanings of a serious story or novel can be understood only by participation in the language of the story itself. To translate them into a message or reduce them to a sermon distorts, betrays, and destroys them… Any reduction of that language into intellectual messages is radically, destructively incomplete.” (67-68)
BioWare’s doctrine of passive writing violates this wisdom by surrendering to their fear of (bad) criticism. The Veilguard lacks punch, stakes, and empathy and becomes incongruous with its established lore because it’s not willing to take risks that might alienate or upset players. They’re more concerned with making sure their work is inoffensive than they are with conveying a moving story.
I believe all of this was inherited from an incestuous feedback loop between a vocal minority of critics, of which I might’ve once counted myself among the blameworthy, and the apprehensiveness of out-of-touch corporate board room decision-making. Dragon Age’s genome mutated, and it slowly lost its teeth.
Over the course of a decade, we bred the Dread Wolf into a Dread Pug.
V. What It Took
The Veilguard’s lack of confidence in itself and lack of faith in its audience contribute to its capitulatory nature. In many respects, it feels like the developers lost their passion for it over the course of the ten year hellish production and just wanted to be done with it. This resulted in a decent game that nonetheless feels divorced from what came before it. It tries to juggle being a soft reboot while also trying to close out the series’s biggest and longest running story arcs, but inevitably fumbles.
Nearly everything done by The Veilguard was handled better by Inquisition. And Inquisition was certainly the more ambitious title. Perhaps more returning characters would have established a sense of continuity between the two, or at least made it less awkward by having them present for the story’s grand finale. For as strong as the endgame is, it could’ve benefited from the presence of slave liberator Fenris, elven history aficionado Merrill, possible Evanuris soul vessel Sera, or Divine Victoria (any of them). The core pillar of Dragon Age is the characters, and The Veilguard’s under-performance (and in some cases, outright dismissal) in that regard sabotages its integrity. Without this to anchor it, the changes to gameplay, visuals, and roleplaying depth become more alienating.
Personally, what do I take away from this? The Veilguard is far from the game I dreamed about for ten years, and not the one that loyal fans deserved either. I’m no stranger to disappointment at this point in my life, and yet this still leaves me with a hollow feeling. Will I still be able to return to Inquisition, a game I truly adore, and see it the same way as before, knowing now where all this is leading? The true cost of The Veilguard, for me, has nothing to do with the price tag: it’s the loss of that perfectly tailored dream, now that the possibilities of the future have shut their gates.
Where do those dreams go? Are they doomed to fester in their lonely, incommunicable agony? Will they be twisted by their enmity, like the blighted dreams of the Titans, and spread their corruption into those important happy memories?
In 2014, I was depressed as fuck, and Dragon Age: Inquisition helped me to see the light and come out of it. In 2024, I was depressed as fuck, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard made me feel nothing. There’s no less favorable comparison in my eyes. It’s disheartening to behold something that once meant so much to me and be greeted with numbness. I have to wonder if that affection will ever return, or if I’ve just grown out of it.
But as I wandered the streets of Minrathous as Rook, I heard a familiar song. It was one of the tavern songs from Inquisition, its nostalgic chords filling me with wistful sentiment. I know, deep down, there’s still something there. Maybe I just need to dig it up. Maybe it’s time to look back…
To be continued…
– Hunter Galbraith
Further Reading
Le Guin, Ursula K. “A Message about Messages.” Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction, Abrams Image, 2018, pp. 67–68.
Incidentally, this was an anomaly my friends and I pondered over and eventually solved. It turned out to be a former Wienerschnitzel. ↩︎
You could argue that this credit goes more to Inquisition and the previous games for laying the groundwork for said reveals, which were obviously planned out ahead of time, as confirmed by the aforementioned official artbook. Regardless, the payoff satisfied me and gave me proper closure. ↩︎
I’ve been informed that there is a hidden conversation that explains that the Lords of Fortune do, in fact, sell cultural artifacts at times, but only to the rightful owners. This just makes me wonder what they do with the artifacts if the prospective clients can’t pay. Do they shove them back in the ruins and re-arm all the booby traps? ↩︎
I would argue that this does not represent character progression on Isabela’s part, as her (possible, depending on the player’s choices) return of the Tome of Koslun in Dragon Age II was a pragmatic sacrifice she made to save her friends and the city, rather than an acknowledgment of the qunari’s inviolable ownership. In fact, in many continuities, she never returns the Tome at all. ↩︎
I prefer more formalist criticism because it allows the text to lead the dance, not the critique. I think it’s only fair, given that the creators likely spent more effort crafting the piece than I spent consuming it. Symptomatic criticism mandates that the reader consider everything around the text, typically at the text’s expense. In the worst cases, symptomatic critics make their arguments about seemingly everything besides the text in question. ↩︎
Link to article: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2025/01/01/dragon-age-the-veilguard-strangled-by-gentle-hands/
So, for anyone who read the FF7 Rebirth essay on Tumblr, rather than the main site, it turns out that several paragraphs (basically ones that came before/after images) were just... not there! So the essay made no sense and a bunch of my points were completely lost! Stay classy, Tumblr.
If you have any interest, please check those sections again to see the updated version. I sincerely apologize for the issue.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: A World Beyond Anger (Part Seven)
VII. This Isn’t About Saving the World – It’s About Me
My thoughts kept returning to the Gi tribe. Why did I find them so evocative?
In their pursuit of nonexistence, they cultivated their anguish, focusing it to corrupt a sacred relic. Their wishes and dreams could empower this materia – maybe they could’ve wished for a better life, a spot in the lifestream to accept them, or the fortitude to endure undying eons. But they didn’t. They did not want hope. They only sought deeper and deeper despair that could finally bring them the peace of oblivion. In the depths of their woe, they forged a power to bestow death to everything:
“Steeped in our one desire… Purest of materia no more… With pain and spite made black.”
Spite is one hell of a motivator. I felt so betrayed by the ending of Remake that I genuinely wanted Rebirth to be abhorrent. I stopped wishing for a game that would make me like the series as I once did, because I knew that hope just heralds disappointment. Caught between contradictory feelings of love and hate, I always felt dishonest to myself no matter what mindset I kept toward project. When I tried to be positive, I felt like I was dismissing my own hurt feelings; when I accentuated the negative, I had to force myself not to like the elements that I otherwise appreciated. I needed this internal argument silenced. Like the Gi, I couldn’t abide in limbo any longer.
A confluence of emotions got tangled up with these silly games. They mutated into a kind of cathectic reservoir, into which all the excess frustrations of my life flowed. Remake released in April of 2020. At that time, I had recently lost one of my best friends to a drug overdose. My beloved dog, whom I’d had since childhood, was dying. I had just gotten out of a long-term relationship. The United States political situation deteriorated further and further. And of course, a little thing called the COVID-19 pandemic struck. At the time, the world seemed cruel, and I resented my lot in life. I thought that the release of a piece of media that I’d anticipated for so long would help me feel better, but that escapism just resulted in more pain. With the literal years of isolation that followed (plus a nearly fatal snow storm), trapped at home and unable to see the people that I loved more than anything in the world, I just kept revisiting that disappointment, again and again. When every day is effectively the same, you endlessly repeat the same motions, the same feelings. In that manic state, FF7R became a sort of emblem for me, reminding me that I can’t have nice things and should not expect better from my life in any regard.
Life got better, though. Sort of. Daily life remains as challenging as ever, and new trials never stop emerging. At least I’m not locked up and scared anymore, though. Yet that game, and its impending follow-up, stayed stuck in my craw throughout the intervening years. I wish that I knew a less severe word for “trauma”, as I do not wish to trivialize the experiences of people who’ve suffered actual hardship – but this particular bugbear of mine acted as a conduit that would involuntarily drag me back to one of the worst periods of my life. Reliving that pain over and over, even as I turned these games into veritable lightning rods for my redirected negative energy, took its toll on me. The solution, to me, was to convince myself that I hated everything about them – that the hurt they gave me was all they ever were and all they ever would be. At least then they would be so unappealing that I’d never risk getting hurt again.
The results speak for themselves. I tried out Rebirth anyway, and it left me as conflicted as ever. This time, though, I feel like I’ve found meaning in that imbalance. I saw my petty struggle mirrored on the stage of a digital melodrama, and I gained a new perspective. The narrative focuses heavily on people and groups grappling with grief and spite, and the consequences of letting those demons consume you. Dyne’s rabid fury steers him to his end, denying him the chance of ever holding his daughter with an unsullied hand. Red XIII and Aerith both temper their impulses to maim Hojo after all the misery he’s inflicted upon them. Tifa divulges her previous desire for vengeance against Shinra, but how that hatred wasn’t sustainable. Cloud increasingly loses himself to murderous urges. Sephiroth’s new plan apparently hinges on a harvest of spite and sorrow from sufferers cursing their fates. Through these cases, Rebirth admonishes against obsessive anger, no matter how justified, because the true victim will always be the one reenacting their prior trauma. To draw from Aerith once more:
“It’s true that the pain and the anger we carry can make us stronger. But at what cost? What toll does it take? I believe true strength doesn’t come from any of that. True strength comes from our ability to forgive – to forge ahead in the hope of making things right. It comes from ourselves.”
It would be nice to have our problems solved for us – so that we had no reason to be angry to begin with. For me, that would’ve come in the form of a perfect adaptation: one with all of the charms that I love and none of the aspects that I hate. Y’know, just something made specifically for me, with no one else considered. Nobody’s that lucky, though. Not me, and certainly not the Gi:
“The Gi cannot rest until our sacred treasure has been restored to us. Moreover, in redressing the crimes of her ancestors, the Cetra may help us let go our ancient grudge.”
The only one who can let go of a grudge is the one who holds it. If the Gi got their Black Materia back, all it would accomplish is an extinction event. There’s no forgiveness there. The Gi must attain their peace through different means. Anger and depression must give way to acceptance – acceptance of others’ faults, acceptance of the reality of your situation, and acceptance of all the seemingly contradictory feelings swirling about that are, nonetheless, still yours.
I keep imagining alternate worlds. What if Square Enix had done this or that differently, and given us a better story? I can picture a game that would be easier for me to love. I see the contrast between what could have been with the real product, and it seeds dismay. Do these dreams help after a certain point? I realize that I cannot hide from my reality like Cloud does in the closing minutes of Rebirth. Contentment will never reach you when you’re holding out for something that will never happen. Hoping for a different fate gets you nowhere; despising your current one sends you backwards. When we linger on what we wish to be different, those unfulfilled desires, the futile hopes to rectify the past, invariably trap us in a state of permanent agitation. Only through embracing what we’ve experienced, the good and the bad, can we truly move beyond it.
As outlined earlier, I believe the third entry will likely flow with this theme, resolving on the cast achieving peace with themselves and their past woes. If it does not, so be it. I intend to internalize this lesson, even if Square does not. In the most unorthodox way, Rebirth spoke to me, and I will both acknowledge its flaws and consider its wisdom. I don’t think I’ll ever fully support the direction they took with this series. Maybe someday there will be a mod that serves as a “fan edit” to remove the distasteful elements. It’s halfway there, considering that most important scenes are intact, and the fact that you can skip Zack’s interludes on subsequent playthroughs. Until then, I have to accept a simple truth: I had fun, despite everything that bothered me.
At times, I frightened myself with how much I enjoyed the game. Knowing ahead of time that the ending would bite me in the ass, I even considered quitting to avoid that bitter sting. I thought, “What’s the point in pressing on if it all ends in disappointment?” Well, what’s the point in living, then? Sometimes we’re so afraid of pain that we would deny any chance of joy along with it. You could guess that such impulses might arise from our death drives, a primal push towards stasis.
No, I choose pleasure in the end. I choose life. Even if you know it will eventually end, I think there’s value in the transient moments of bliss. Just as it’s worth it to bond with a fictional flower girl, even knowing her tragic fate, because that story is worth experiencing regardless.
Believe me, the last thing I expected to get out of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, given my history,was a message about how life is worth living. You can’t wallow in impossible dreams, you can’t stew in impotent rage, and you can’t give in to a wish for nothingness. You must cherish what you love and accept that one day, it will fade. Nevertheless, it was real.
I won’t let my agreement or disagreement with Square’s story decisions dictate my enjoyment on principle anymore. Maybe the next game will stick the landing. Maybe not. Going by past performance, it’s likely to get 90% of the way there and then trip at the finish line. My cautiously optimistic outlook from my previous essay did not stick with me, so I cannot say that my uncharacteristically harmonious relationship with Rebirth will persevere either. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this ordeal, it’s that unexpected outcomes occur precisely because you don’t know everything. Either way, I’ll be back here in three or four years. Until then, I’ll do my best to live in the moment and be true to my feelings as they are now.
– Hunter Galbraith
Interview translations credit to @aitaikimochi and @ShinraArch.
Further Reading
Freud, Sigmund, et al. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Norton, 1989.
FULL ESSAY: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2024/05/11/final-fantasy-vii-rebirth-a-world-beyond-anger/
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: A World Beyond Anger (Part Six)
VI. … And Why It Doesn’t Matter
You thought I was done complaining? No, never.
Doubtless someone will punch holes in my theory, and I wouldn’t even feign indignation. The truth is that none of the explanations posed by fans have established a coherent story. But the fact that this is where our attention has been directed – away from the emotional moments that give stories relevance in the first place – exposes the shallowness of this trade-off. Even if my desired theory comes to fruition, I don’t think it redeems Rebirth’s rendition of Aerith’s death.
The consistency, or lack thereof, between the obnoxious multiverse stuff and the franchise’s established lore ultimately matters little when you’ve already squandered that critical moment that makes us care. From whatever universe you view it, Rebirth demonstrates a puzzling ambivalence to Aerith’s passing. The impact of loss never lands, because moments later you have Zack stepping in for a tag-team match with Cloud against Sephiroth. It’s framed as some fist-pumping “fuck yeah” moment, complete with embarrassingly out-of-place musical callbacks and quotes from Crisis Core (2007). It doesn’t feel like purposeful whiplash to create a sense of disorientation, but rather completely tone-deaf and disrespectful fanservice, all during a moment that should leave the player feeling hollow. And no sooner has Aerith left the building than she rises again like the goddamn Undertaker, kicking ass and eliminating any modicum of loss. Whether she’s in the lifestream or a parallel timeline or a phantom of Cloud’s addled mind is a distinction without a difference. Her death – and perhaps all death in the series – has lost its significance, because it feels merely inconvenient.
Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series and story planner for the original FF7, channeled the pain and shock of his mother’s death into the loss of Aerith. Where once there was a source of joy, now there is only a void that will never be filled. In the original game, you’ll always have that empty slot on your party selection screen to remind you of who you’re missing. It’s an aching, uncomfortable treatment of death in fiction that was unconventional for its medium at the time. It cut straight to players’ hearts. With this is mind, does Rebirth capture anything remotely comparable? Should we call Sakaguchi and tell him his mom is still kicking somewhere?
When asked about the scene by Game Informer, Nomura had this to say:
“Prior to Final Fantasy VII, there have been other titles where characters have experienced tragedy, but many of them have come back or been revived in some ways. But I believe that loss is something that happens unexpectedly, and it’s not something so dramatic or drawn out, but is something in which a person that you have just conversed with is suddenly gone and never to come back. I believe that the person who dies should not return in this title, and that is what we did with the original… I do believe that the way we have depicted it brings about a new emotion and a new feeling for both players who have played the original Final Fantasy VII and newcomers.”
I struggle to conceive what this “new emotion” could be. Bewilderment? I can’t imagine another response when the developers diminish the tragedy of a lost friend because they want you to be more invested in keeping track of the stupid cartoon dog! Nothing can rationalize the cluttering of this sequence with a shell game that asks us to follow the Black/White/Clear Materia. This sequence, and the events immediately leading up to it, should not have been reduced to a gimmick of prestidigitation. We’re not wondering what we’ll do without Aerith – we’re wondering which sleeve she’s hiding in, so to speak. All of these unnecessary contrivances dare you to solve them, encourage you to switch off your Lizard Brain. But if you turn off your Lizard Brain and welcome those higher mammal functions, you’re bound to see how stupid all of this truly is. For Christ’s sake, we’re naming these worlds after dog breeds! Is that really worth what we’ve lost?
Mechanically-speaking, too, I feel the 1997 game better executed the subsequent battle. There’s an often overlooked quality of the Jenova LIFE fight: It’s really easy. Equip the Water Ring you picked up five minutes earlier and you’ve essentially won the fight. This works really well because you’re not supposed to be thinking hard about strategy and tactics or rocking out to Jenova’s awesome theme song – the battle just gives you time to chew on what’s happened, all the while Aerith’s theme softly rings in your ears. Rebirth gives you a complicated, high-flying, multi-stage boss fight that drops your dead friend’s musical motif midway through. Now, your party is dropkicking an eldritch monster and shouting quips, while electric guitars and synths blare in the background. You need to be actively paying attention for the hour-long boss gauntlet that follows, and it feels wrong to me. I didn’t party wipe; I’m not bad at this game (I beat Gilgamesh at level 49, prior to the endgame) – but micromanaging a chaotic battle drains what little emotion remained. I just felt numb in between fits of laughter.
That is to say, the ending of Rebirth feels like a trip to the dentist.
New mysteries take priority over an earnest portrayal of events, and I just don’t think they’re compelling enough to warrant that. Our knowledge of them has barely advanced since part one. We knew going in that Zack was in a different world, denoted by a different Stamp. And now we know… that there are different worlds denoted by different Stamps. For all the rigmarole, we learned shockingly little. The mystery didn’t really progress, aside from showcasing such a circus of inconsistencies that we’re basically forced to accept that it operates on dream logic. The true ending remains to be seen, but if the clues only amount to “the clues not adding up”, then I’d say that this plotline hasn’t felt rewarding.
My gut tells me this all leads to a cul-de-sac. I judge these riddles as cynical mystery boxes with little concrete direction. Rebirth backtracks on several of Remake’s more audacious changes, completely dropping plot points in some cases. I suspect the final game will do the same, and we’ll have something approaching the original. After all, this “adds up” to Advent Children, by Kitase’s admission. The man likewise expressed that the story will likely be adjusted based on audiences’ responses to the ending of the second part. Given that the narrative disruptions have had mixed reactions at best this time, I believe it’s fair to guess that we’re just looping back to the OG plot anyway.
With all of this in mind, attempting to unravel these unknown elements seems like a massive waste of time. I don’t find this ending quite as intolerable as that of Remake, but it still comes off as tacky and desperate. I think the third part will likely still be fun and contain many of the great moments from the latter half of the original. But I can’t hide my disappointment that, even though my worst nightmares about the project didn’t come to pass, it didn’t fully rehabilitate itself in my eyes either.
I won’t lie – when I started to feel that familiar anger rising again, I got scared. I didn’t get the clean resolution that I wanted, and I worried that destructive obsession would take me over again. I feared I was about to relapse into the world’s stupidest addiction.
All of a sudden, it clicked together. I spent 120 hours staring straight at the answer, oblivious to it. Yet it finally came to me.
FULL ESSAY: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2024/05/11/final-fantasy-vii-rebirth-a-world-beyond-anger/
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: A World Beyond Anger (Part Five)
V. A Generous Interpretation…
Ordinarily, I eschew theories and predictions about where an ongoing story might lead, because I prefer to withhold a holistic reading of a text until the text is… well, whole. But at the risk of doing exactly what the marketing team wants from me, I must make an exception. To be honest, I don’t actually believe that we’re dealing with alternate timelines or discrete universes in the traditional (i.e. dumb mass media) sense. Upon visiting Cosmo Canyon, a nameless NPC has some easily missed dialogue that sheds some light on how we’re meant to interpret what’s happening:
“So… my parents are no longer with us – here, that is – but I believe they’re still out there, on another plane. I’ve been reading a bunch of theories on this alternate world in the hope of going there someday. And over the course of my studies, I stumbled across a fascinating theory. It addressed the issue of what the lifestream is, arguing that spiritual energy is actually a manifestation of our knowledge and memories. Like I said, it’s a fascinating theory… but it’s incomplete. What about our hopes and dreams? We remember those, don’t we? So what if spiritual energy doesn’t distinguish between our real, lived memories and the unrealized desires buried deep in our hearts? What if coming into contact with that energy allowed us to ‘peer through the looking glass,’ so to speak? It’s just an idea, but… I hope to find the truth someday.”
A tagline for Rebirth is “What is fact and what is fiction?” While this cryptic ad copy definitely alludes to Cloud’s false memories, I suspect it also hints at the nature of these alternate worlds – namely, that they’re illusory.
The world we explore through Zack’s eyes doesn’t add up. Supposedly, all of the events of Remake occurred just prior to his arrival, but that doesn’t account for why he’s arrived several months later than he should have, or how he carries a comatose Cloud in tow. Biggs, who also seemingly died, likewise appears in this world. He remembers Cloud from his adventures in part one. As if this asynchronous timeline wasn’t enough, both Zack and Biggs mention that their internal clocks seem broken – they can’t tell how much time has passed since they arrived. Meanwhile, the world has suddenly withered without anyone noticing, and an ominous crack of doom looms in the sky. Far from the radiant golden glow that we saw in the closing cutscene of the first installment, this Midgar evokes a fanciful dream morphed into a nightmare.
I believe that these separate takes on reality are manifestations within the lifestream – demi-realities given the illusion of form through the echo of subconscious desires. Keeping with the Freudian theme, we can surmise that such desires materialize as dreams. Aerith likely left some sort of metaphysical impression when she zapped the plot ghosts at the end of Remake. Everyone who shows up in this nonsensical dream world are people that she knew, pantomiming their lives through the ever darkening scenario. Just as we populate our dreams with the people we know in the waking world, I believe most of the individuals in these worlds are projections based on how Aerith views them, acting as she unconsciously directs them. The exceptions are Zack and Biggs, who appear more like errant ghosts, drawn in by her unfulfilled desires for their survival. If we compare this evidence to the narrative’s broader conflict between the pleasure principle and the death drive, we can deduce the following: To deny death is to master desire; to master desire is to live in a dream.
The original story’s lifestream sequence provides us with the smoking gun for this explanation – the presence of the same golden rift across the sky that we see in both Zack’s world and Cloud’s perspective during the ending cutscene. Within the demi-realities, this crack in the fabric of the universe portends the coming apocalypse. But perhaps it really symbolizes the fleeting succor that these delusions provide before crumbling to the inescapable truth? Fate seems determined to correct these worlds (perhaps reflective of the grieving process), as different iterations still end with Biggs dead and Zack facing an onslaught of Shinra gunfire.
The previously linked chart of the “timelines” posits that Cloud creates a new timeline where he saves Aerith during the finale. As explained, I disagree with this being a logical, causality-driven event, and suggest that it’s instead fundamentally illogical. Aerith’s apparent survival comes from Cloud’s denial of reality – his inability to cope with failure and loss. Whether she’s a projection on a transitory plane or entirely a figment of Cloud’s imagination, the point stands that it’s an unnatural, unhealthy, artificial existence. I do not think she is alive in both body and spirit somewhere, or that the confluence and sundering of worlds somehow sends one spirit to the afterlife and leaves the other alive and conscious. If that’s the case, then that is extremely stupid, and would paint the party’s inability to see what Cloud sees as a deficiency on their part. Cloud is not red-pilled; he does not see an omniverse while all the plebeians stare at shadows on the wall of a cave. Making him perceptive of real, tangible worlds beyond normal observation would devastate his character arc, which hinges on him accepting his weakness and shattering his delusions.
With all due respect to other theorists, I believe that the rainbow light denotes not the splitting of timelines, but instead points of interference within the lifestream. We see the rainbows appear when summoning entities from materia, when interacting with lifesprings, and even when transitioning into the Fort Condor minigame (consider the authenticity of those literal toys in relation to the memory-images of people in these alternate worlds). I can see why some players interpret the rainbow as a path of divergence, since it recalls the image of light passing through a prism. But I think that rainbows can have many meanings: unity, inclusion, hope, etc. For this reading, though, I’d like to draw attention to what rainbows really are – tricks of light, illusions toward which humans commonly ascribe superstitious awe. From Biblical covenants to viral internet videos that you haven’t thought of in over a decade, rainbows captivate onlookers, who assign them phenomenal importance. Rainbows, however, lack substance – they cannot be touched, they cannot give you that promised pot of gold. They provide temporary bliss and then fade, as all insubstantial novelties do. Seeing one in an oil spill doesn’t mean the environment’s not in danger. Thus, I think Rebirth’s use of rainbows factors into ideas of perception, delusions, and coping mechanisms.
If there’s any validity to this interpretation, then where should the story go from here? Well, Kitase said in an interview with Vandal that, although the final entry in the trilogy will culminate in a happy ending, it won’t be “sunshine and rainbows.” Perhaps that’s a hint, perhaps it’s a Freudian slip, or perhaps I am projecting my own desires onto my reading. Regardless, I think the dissolution of these dream purgatories is the only satisfying way to close this plotline. The worlds seem condemned to perish soon after their nascence. They’re only born when fate’s boundaries are breached, which can’t be an everyday occurrence. Cloud even describes the planet as “screaming” in agony as a response to this fission and fusion.
Cloud and Aerith’s dream worlds seemingly emerge as wishful fabrications where their loved ones live on, but the latter goes on to explain that death is a natural part of life:
“Y’know… If you think about it, life and death are just two sides of the same coin. Our bodies may disappear when we die, but our spirits still live on. We return to the planet, rejoin the lifestream, and – in time – give rise to new life.”
Aerith rebukes Sephiroth’s desire to forge an everlasting world, claiming there’s no such thing as “forever.” Cheating death comes naturally for him, and so the conflict won’t end until he, like everyone, accepts his mortality. Far ahead of him, the apparition of Aerith at the end refers to her current location as a “second home” – alluding to the multiple references of death as a “homecoming” and confirming her acceptance of her passing.
Cloud’s repression has taken root, and he must learn the truth in order to dissolve the false reality that he’s conjured. Through a veil of static interference immediately following her death, the player can see Cloud silently mouthing the words that he initially uttered there in the 1997 title. I believe he gives the same speech here, too, only to erase it from his conscious memory and escape into his delusions. As with Zack, so with Aerith.
This is why I really appreciate what they did with Tifa in the Gongaga section. At first, I was hesitant toward the premature revelation about her mother’s death, but now I see it as a potential setup for an emotionally resonant scene in part three. Cloud and Tifa will inevitably fall into the lifestream, where she will help him reconstruct his memories and accept his true self, as dictated by the source material. However, I think now she will also aid him in overcoming his grief about Aerith.
“You saved me before; now it’s my turn.”
Tifa says this to Cloud after recounting their shared childhood trauma. Unknowingly marching toward her death, Tifa believed that her departed mother was waiting for her across the Mount Nibel. Cloud intercepted her and tried to free her from her delusions. I hope that we see her repay him in the final game – she will bring him back to reality and help him to move on. The dead are gone forever. The best way to honor their memory is not repression, or regression, or Reunion – but progression, living for the future, and pacifying that drive toward death (inevitable though it may be).
In the end, Aerith says it best:
“I get it, I really do. Knowing that the people we love aren’t really gone? It doesn’t make it any easier to let them go. It still hurts. So we can’t just think of it as a ‘homecoming.’ ‘Cause it’s not that simple. We’ve all experienced pain. We all have our regrets. What we’ve done – what’s been done to us – that’s set in stone. The past is forever. But the future – even if it has been written – can be changed.”
Should the writing of the third entry opt to follow this path, rather than the full-on comic book multiverse option, I’ll find it more agreeable – maybe even moving.
Something is still missing, though. For some reason, those assurances still aren’t enough for me.
FULL ESSAY: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2024/05/11/final-fantasy-vii-rebirth-a-world-beyond-anger/
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: A World Beyond Anger (Part Four)
IV. Crisis on Infinite Aeriths
Let’s get this out of the way: this game should not have ended at the Forgotten Capital. It makes little sense from a dramatic perspective. I defended the decision to center the entire first chapter around Midgar, because although that arc does not nearly comprise one-third of the original game’s length, it nonetheless fits well as the first act of a grander story. Additionally, Midgar contains a miniature three-act structure in itself: reactor bombings (act 1), meeting Aerith through the plate collapse (act 2), and the raid on the Shinra building (act 3). Rebirth doesn’t share this structure, partially because it’s adapting only part of the “road trip” that constitutes the second act of FF7. This results in a narrative that feels meandering, particularly because it cuts off prematurely.
The lowpoint of the original game – and consequently, where the second act really wraps up – is not Aerith’s death. It’s the Northern Crater. Cloud surrenders to Sephiroth’s control, believing all of his memories to be false. Sephiroth acquires the Black Materia and summons Meteor to eradicate all human life on the planet. The Weapons awaken to wreak havoc on the terrified populace. A cave-in sends Cloud tumbling into the lifestream, his fate unknown. Tifa and Barret awaken in custody of Shinra, awaiting public execution. Now that’s a cliffhanger!
But with all the “changing destiny” nonsense from part one, the flower girl’s fate became a central focus of fan speculation, and as such, an obnoxiously large part of the marketing.
As the “big payoff”, the developers naturally felt inclined to conclude Rebirth with the (very dumb) answer to this question. Catering to hype culture comes at the expense of a well-paced story. Several of the key setups within Rebirth, such as the destination of the robed men, could’ve been resolved had the game gone just a bit further. The same goes for the photographer that snaps a picture of the visiting SOLDIERS during the first hour. Proper pacing would’ve provided a bookend with the reveal of the real photo, and Cloud’s subsequent meltdown. In failing to reach the Northern Crater, the central axis of story just spins in place until it comes to an abrupt halt. Progressing to this point would’ve doubtlessly necessitated the developers to make a chunk of more content. However, they could’ve easily pivoted their priorities away from any of the open world locales, sidequests, or minigames to facilitate this. Hell, they could’ve trimmed down some of the critical path in order to get us there – they already omitted Wutai, Rocket Town, and Bone Village, after all.
Missteps like this robbed us of a perfect opportunity to face a delirious, indoctrinated Cloud as the final boss. I think that would’ve been more heartbreaking and impactful than yet another tedious Sephiroth fight. As with Remake, the silver-haired villain’s portrayal fails to instill any semblance of fear or danger. His overuse has ballooned to critical mass, turning him into Final Fantasy VII’s very own Poochie. It should be obvious that for every time a villain shows up and fails to impede the protagonists, fails to slay his targets, fails to turn the emotionally frail to his purpose, he comes across as less and less competent. By the time you’ve beaten the now-multidimensional quasi-deity again, he literally flies away, promising to do better next time. It’s simply baffling how poorly the creative leads have handled Sephiroth throughout this project, and how little they understand the proper escalation of stakes.
He’s far from the only bungled character, though. Cid Highwind always posed a challenge to adapt, due to his verbal and emotional abuse of his live-in assistant, Shera. Heroically framing a domestic abuser would not fly as easily today as it did in 1997, so I understand the need for changes. But they didn’t need to change everything about him. Original Cid’s pathos comes from the fact that he, like much of the rest of the cast, carries the burden of a life destroyed by Shinra. The rusting hulk of his derelict rocket, once the source of his dreams, anchors him to a life of lingering regrets, reminding him of his failures. This is the immutable foundation of his character. Square could’ve expressed his anguish in any number of ways: depression, self-loathing, alcoholism, whatever.
Instead, their solution to avoid him abusing Shera was… getting rid of Shera. There’s nothing in Rebirth to suggest his background as a failed astronaut. Instead, he’s a “free flier” – literally the opposite of what he’s supposed to represent. His abrasive attitude has been toned down. He’s now a right proper gentleman, if a bit cocky. I’m sure that the third game will reintegrate Rocket Town and Shera in some capacity, but I can’t reconcile the new Cid with anything that might resemble his designated arc for the future. The man doesn’t even smoke anymore, despite his omnipresent cigarette previously serving as a running gag. God forbid we depict a good guy using tobacco; what would the children think?
In general, the remake games have shied away from their characters having grit to them. Cait Sith no longer holds Marlene hostage to gain leverage over the party. Avalanche’s members all commit themselves to strictly non-violent terrorism… despite getting booted from the main branch for their extremist tactics. Players face several instances of my least favorite trope in all of media: the protagonists’ refusal to kill the villains responsible for countless deaths, even though they have no qualm with slaughtering dozens of nameless mooks that get in the way. It’s not crossing some moral threshold for them, so instances where they object to killing President Shinra, Rufus, Hojo, and the Turks all feel forced and bereft of meaning. Far more stories are guilty of this than just the FF7R titles, but it drives me nuts every time I see it.
The fact remains that these two games consistently come across as insecure in their portrayal of violence and death, as if they’re worried of upsetting the audience. Remake was admittedly much worse about this sort of thing – refer to the evacuation of all named NPCs and countless others in Sector 7, or the omission of Sephiroth’s bloody rampage through the Shinra building. Rebirth’s still worried about those content rating guidelines, though. So no deaths among the Shinra-8’s crewmen, no explicit suicide for Dyne, no hanging from the neck, and no on-screen impalement. Individually, I don’t think any one of these faults are particularly egregious, but once you see the pattern, it becomes difficult not to roll your eyes at the constant sanitization.
Which leads us, at last, to Aerith’s death scene. Or whatever that was.
Whereas the ending of part one left me shaking with anger and repulsed by its pretentious, hypocritical, and indulgent messaging, the finale of Rebirth had me cackling like I was watching a Neil Breen movie. “Trainwreck” does not convey the fiasco’s enormity. Imagine a Rube Goldberg machine comprised of trains. Imagine some messed up Ouroboros train, perpetually crashing into its caboose, forever. That’s the ending of this game. In the span of an hour, we visit no less than four alternate dimensions, swap around an interplanar orb, subvert Aerith’s anticipated death (obviously), subvert that subversion, cut back and forth between a potential alternate timeline/hallucination throughout a bombastic Jenova fight, merge worlds (whatever that means and however it happens, your guess is as good as mine), fight Sephiroth with Zack in a fanservice brawl, fight Bizarro Sephiroth prematurely across three planes of existence, enter another world to be joined by Aerith’s Jedi ghost and clobber Sephiroth once more, then skip her funeral scene because who cares about that shit at this point?
Reactions to this conclusion have been mostly negative, which at least makes me feel less lonely in my criticisms than I did last time. The developers hoodwinked fewer folks this go around, and you’ll see fewer people calling this a “bold step in a new direction” than a “colossal fucking mess.” I almost admire how Square managed to unify the divided fanbase with this approach. Those who wanted Aerith to live this time got baited and shafted, and those who wanted the story done justice received a pandering succession of winks and gotchas that robbed the moment of its crucial meaning. A part of me wants to think the creators aimed to please both sides and failed miserably, but creative director Tetsuya Nomura seemed to know what they had on their on hands:
“But with Rebirth, I honestly cannot imagine what players will be thinking. For example, I set up the direction of the final scene in FFVII Remake that you asked about. I can’t really talk about it now, so I’ll just say that the final scene of the next game will have a very… different impact to the previous one. I’m even more nervous about how people are going to react to some of the things in Rebirth than I was for Remake.”
Any change to a sacred moment would have elicited controversy. I mean, who has a more iconic death than Aerith? Jesus, maybe?
Some might defend these choices, arguing that the sudden brutality of her demise and instant shock of having a loved one taken from you, as in the original, could not be replicated. Therefore, changing the plot here was necessary. I object to this premise on two points:
1. That’s an absolutely cowardly way to view art. It betrays a lack of confidence in your storytelling ability if you can’t think of ways to connect to the audience without resorting to ostentatious stunts.
2. If the original scene truly is inimitable, that does not automatically vindicate the execution of the new rendition. Ardent defenders of the FF7R titles tend to frame their arguments around a false dichotomy, where the only choices available were either a 1:1 remake or the precise end product that we received. Obviously, this isn’t the case – I can appreciate the improvements to Yuffie and Red XIII’s arcs without endorsing the plot ghosts or the Zack fanservice. I can, at all moments, visualize a game that could do better. Plenty of remakes tastefully walk the line of creative embellishments. Look no further than Resident Evil 4 (2023) for a work that worthily adapts a classic for contemporary audiences.
With strong source material to draw from, adaptations begin with half their work done for them. This boon comes balanced by the burden that any deviation will inevitably be compared to the original incarnation, and would need to justify its existence against that. As such, it’s completely fair to judge such choices strictly, especially if they result from foolhardy risks that don’t pay off. Bravado does not excuse failure.
What inspired the creative team to alter this specific moment, when the overwhelming majority of Rebirth follows a trodden path? Would that consistency not make Aerith’s death the natural culmination of events? If you’re keeping the story mostly the same, why make such a massive exception for a pivotal scene? I regret to say that I don’t think this decision arose from any genuine passion to enhance the piece, but rather a much more cynical philosophy.
Games take too long to make these days. The commitment to graphical fidelity, expansive worlds, and potentially hundreds of hours of content has stretched production times to untenable levels. Longer development cycles mean ballooning budgets. Ballooning budgets demand bigger returns. Bigger returns necessitate mass market appeal, which results in scope creep. And the cycle repeats. It’s an unsustainable path for the industry. These more distant deadlines aren’t the results of more ethical working conditions, either; crunch culture still dominates the workforce. Employees just crunch longer. In the past few years, we’ve seen several big projects throughout the entertainment sphere bring in hundreds of millions of dollars, only to financially disappoint. Many AAA games have swollen to such unwieldy sizes that they can’t conceivably make the cash they need. Since investors ubiquitously demand growth each quarter, audience retention is paramount.
But again, games take too long to make. Four years passed between the releases of Remake (2020) and Rebirth (2024). In that same amount of time, old Squaresoft gave us Final Fantasy VII (1997), VIII (1999), IX (2000), and X (2001). Obviously, a very different market landscape produced these titles, and I do not wish to imply that Square Enix’s employees are lazy or inefficient in any way. But how can you maintain not just brand interest, but also investment in an episodic story when installments are so spaced out? For comparison, the entire Mass Effect trilogy wrapped up in just over four years (late 2007 – early 2012). Few things can hold mass audience attention for so long without updates or unfeasible marketing.
Controversy to the rescue! By eliciting controversy, speculation, and discourse, companies can keep material fresh in fans’ minds for years, especially in the age of social media. Arguing with pedants on Twitter and making an ass of yourself in the process is among the most cherished pastimes – and the one most likely to get you invested in future outcomes! Folks will never move on as long as they’re bickering, and they’ll bicker as long as there’s divisive stuff to bicker about. In this way, writers can cater to the larger economic forces at play. This might explain why Remake concludes on such a provocative note, only to amount to little beyond the following game’s last minute encore. An interview with Julien Chièze revealed that Kitase wished for audiences to scrutinize and debate the endings and the potential upcoming changes (despite all of this supposedly leading back to Advent Children anyway). Varietyalso conversed with Hamaguchi, who said:
“Now, we anticipate having various conjectures about this ending and many different interpretations from players as this game is released, which will create some healthy debate. I will also be observing the players’ responses, which will allow us to perhaps feed those into, you know, as we look to create the third title as well.”
I suspect that these alterations did not originate via a natural evolution within the narrative, but as a gimmick to perpetuate consumer interest. It’s the classic “mystery box” formula returning to wreak havoc. After seeing this engineered controversy, I wish this project had not been divided into multiple parts.
Most of this financially alluring speculation revolves around the nature of the other “worlds” (delineated by Stamp, the dog mascot) showcased throughout the finale, and whether or not Aerith survives in one of them. To make sense of what we witnessed, enthusiastic players have resorted to complicated diatribes or digital cork board charts, such as this popular one by Reddit user Recklessavatar:
Audiences must be fatigued by multiverses at this point, I feel. Specifically, I’m referring to stories where characters interact with alternate versions of themselves, or travel in between a plethora of divergent continuities, all butterflying away from one another. It’s been the big thing to do in popular media for the past several years – particularly because it allows for stories with “infinite possibilities”, which usually just means an absence of consequences. Superhero stuff, in its waning cinematic renaissance, focuses on multiverse narratives more than ever: the Marvel Cinematic Universe kicked off the “Multiverse Saga” with films like Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022); Sony Pictures graced us with Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse (2018) and Across the Spiderverse (2023); and Warner Bros vomited out The Flash (2023) as a desperate continuity reset. Let’s not ignore the prevalence of the concept in shows like Rick and Morty (2013-ongoing), or its encroachment into otherwise concluded series like Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake (2023). Multiverse mania even wormed its way into an Academy Award Best Picture winner with Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Recent games certainly haven’t escaped this trend. Mortal Kombat 1 (2023) masquerades as a series reboot (again), before turning into a clash between all past continuities and innumerable alternate worlds. Bayonetta 3 (2022) dives headfirst into the concept as well – unfortunately, it’s proven to be an increasingly shallow sea. You’re bound to break your neck if you do that.
It’s not hard to see what makes this premise so attractive to producers. You can connect to older media properties and past interpretations of characters. The tangled web of continuity canonizes old stuff that you liked, baiting that nostalgia cortex in your Lizard Brain and assigning proverbial “required reading” to those less familiar. Existing content can be recombined to generate spin-offs ad infinitum. This phenomenon extends to mushy conglomerates of IPs, where characters are removed from their original context and absorbed into some kind of media katamari. Ready Player One (2018), Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021), MultiVersus (2022), and the various Lego movies (2014, 2016, 2018) count among these. And hey, Final Fantasy VII is connected to Disney through Kingdom Hearts (2002-ongoing)…
The point is, multiverse junk has saturated popular culture lately. Not all of these works are bad, but patterns emerge between them the longer you stare. Common blunders include the erosion of stakes, selective continuity, and the collapse of cohesive worldbuilding. The worst offenders foreground the notion that, inherently, nothing in the diegesis matters whatsoever.
The introduction of several parallel universes to Final Fantasy VII would prove exhausting even if it was implemented well. Piling science-fiction-timeline-balderdash onto a deeply spiritual world of transcendent knowledge and ethereal souls promises to poke holes in the worldbuilding. But it’s not just sloppy – it’s antithetical to the fundamental themes of FF7. In a game about the fragility of life and the frailty of our planet (we only have one of each), you can’t suddenly introduce distinct, alternate versions of the same people across an endless ocean of permeable realities. It annihilates everything for which the original stood.
When I think about this sort of thing, I fear that my pessimistic instincts might’ve been right all along. I worry that I’m somehow betraying myself for finding any value in Rebirth.
All that said, I do see a narrow path forward. Building off my previous psychoanalytic reading, I came to an interpretation of the ending that’s somewhat more palatable, and might even save the franchise for me.
FULL ESSAY: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2024/05/11/final-fantasy-vii-rebirth-a-world-beyond-anger/
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: A World Beyond Anger (Part Three)
III. A Pervert’s Guide to Mortality
Look, I can make juvenile jokes about the massive swords, or the recurrent use of flower imagery, or Sephiroth’s Oedipus complex, or how Cloud riding the dolphin is secretly foreshadowing him having sex with Tifa at the end of disc two1 – but the fact is, Final Fantasy VII basks in Freudian and Jungian ideas. Traumatic repression, unconscious compulsions, personas and shadows, displaced affection, psychological projection – all of these play important roles in the story. That isn’t to say that a psychoanalytic reading supersedes all others, or even that the creators specifically intended it. Concepts related to Mahayana Buddhism obviously permeate the text, and likely carry with them their own baggage that can impact someone’s analysis. But I am not knowledgeable on that subject, and so I hope to offer an interpretation based on my own limited frame of reference.
With its additions to the Final Fantasy VII mythos, Rebirth emphasizes a core tension (and I mean, like, planetary core) between the two predominant drives that motivate human behavior in the Freudian model: the pleasure principle (libido) and the death drive. One governs our desires, survival instincts, goals, and relationships, while the other dictates aggression, self-destructive behavior, repetition, trauma, and ultimately, death itself. Keeping in mind the franchise’s preexisting focus on complex, recursive trauma, let’s look into some of the new scenes that this title added.
Midway through the game, Cloud briefly succumbs to Sephiroth’s influence and, in his psychosis, knocks Tifa into a mako reactor. An infant weapon subsequently swallows her whole and submerges into the lifestream. Tifa awakens, floating in the fetal position inside a bulging orb of materia distending from the belly of the Weapon. According to Hojo, the Weapons are themselves born from these magical wombs, which they recursively absorb. The scenario evokes a fantasy of inverted birth, which could not be truer to the title of the game. In Japanese, Rebirth uses the same kana (リバース)as “reverse” – the double entendre alluding to a regression to an earlier state upon which any “rebirth” is contingent. It’s both the push of gestation and life as it is the pull of nonexistence and oblivion. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud identifies “an urge in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”(43). From this, he concludes that “the aim of all life is death” – or as Sephiroth might put it, a “homecoming” – since “inanimate things existed before living ones” (46).
As the Weapon carries the uterine Tifa through a valley of repressed memories, a swarm of white Whispers flank it. That’s right, this version of the wispy-tailed, cephalic-hooded pests no longer appear to represent puristfans. They instead embody the polar opposite of them: sex! Swirling around the innards of the planet, which is repeatedly referred to as the “Great Mother”, the sperm-like Whispers clash with their black cousins, now servants of Sephiroth. Considering that Remake taught us to think of the Whispers, textually, as the will of the planet, then the opposing forces here represent the instincts of creation and life against the paradoxical allure of corruption and death. Tifa emerges from the Weapon, born anew with transcendental wisdom and reconstituted memories. Her trial of regression fails to subsume her, and instead reinvigorates her life force and commitment to defend the planet. The thematic conflict, as exemplified here, extends to all manners of attraction, nurturing, survival, and future purpose versus sorrow, anger, fatalism, and past trauma.
The Freudian model intrinsically associates the positive, exciting energies of the libido with sexual desire. It’s little wonder why Rebirth is so horny. We get an entire titillating beach episode with Cloud’s shirtless twunk body and Tifa’s bikini-clad figure clearly captivating one another. Romance mechanics have been expanded, and random NPCs can’t help but thirst for the crew as they pass by. Every few minutes, it seems like Cloud’s adventure gets interrupted by some new homoerotic rival figure who helps him grow through their challenges. Chief among them is Roche, whose unsubtle mastery of the red hot rocket between his legs powers his every impulse. And God, does he love it; that is, until he succumbs to Sephiroth’s influence, after which he crashes and destroys his phallic hog. His loss of self accompanies his symbolic castration.
But beyond the realm of sexy people doing sexy things, libidinal energies influence all manner of life-preserving behaviors. Several quests involve the party acting as surrogate parents or protectors to baby animals. Yuffie affectionately names a baby bird “Cloud Jr.”, and the group defends the fledgling from predators. Upon returning to Nibelheim, Tifa locates her old cat, Fluffy, and protects her and her seven kittens from encroaching monsters. And rounding out this pattern, Cloud even has to play babysitter in that godforsaken Mooglet roundup minigame.
Death instincts, by contrast, manifest most acutely as traumatic repetition – that is, the unconscious return to a source of pain, or reenactment of its circumstances, against all life-preserving logic. Barret’s misery stems from the detonation of a faulty mako reactor, which Shinra used as a pretext to destroy his hometown. Ironically, he retaliates against the company by orchestrating his own reactor bombings. However, his death instincts do not consume him, as his fatherly care for Marlene and goal of saving the environment keeps these suicidal impulses in check. Dyne lacks this lifeline; without Marlene in his life, left to grieve alone for her and his wife, he turns to self-destructive violence. He kills with no provocation or goal, channeling his desire for death along a “circuitous path” through which he projects it (literally) onto others (Freud, 45).
“All the lives I took, just to fill the hole in my heart. Just to fill the void they left… I wanna see them again, and I know what I need to do… but I can’t. I just can’t… Eleanor and Marlene are waiting for me, but… but I can’t bring myself to join ‘em.”
With an insufficient drive toward pleasure and love, Dyne invites his own demise. He looms as Barret’s shadow, a grim what-could-have-been.
Both Cloud and Tifa experience PTSD flashbacks, especially in areas near their hometown massacre – a self-destructive behavior beyond their control, triggered by unconscious mechanisms. Disturbingly, we witness Cloud mimicking the source of his trauma several times, like when he adopts Sephiroth’s sword stance in the Gongaga reactor, or when repeating his words verbatim at the Mount Nibel lifespring. Through the use of Jenova’s cellular magnetism, Sephiroth can manipulate his past victims as puppets and proxies. They become signal boosters to perpetuate his evil. True to his nature as the son of an interstellar parasite, he aims to influence the compulsion toward death as a means to his eternal survival and satisfaction: first via the sacrifice of the black robes, inexorably marching to their Reunion at their mother’s call; then by expediting the life cycle of the planet, returning souls to the lifestream en masse. During the final battle, he generates a form akin to the Weapons, “Reborn” with a gibbous protuberance on his abdomen. In other words, the game climaxes with the party whacking his giant mpreg belly to halt his autogenetic apotheosis.
The visual metaphor is downright insane, and I feel like I should be locked up for parsing it this way.
Zack’s intermissions take place in a world of despair, an apparent dream-turned-nightmare, where the apocalypse seems inevitable. Most inhabitants have lost the will to live positively or with purpose. It is from worlds like these that Sephiroth intends to harvest negative energy, perhaps to spur the planet along on its self-destructive course. Back in the real world, he stokes war between Midgar and Wutai. Aggression, hatred, memetic trauma, and the welcoming of death seem to empower Sephiroth and further his designs. And nowhere does a desire for death manifest stronger than among the Gi.
Revealed in Rebirth to be aliens confined to spectral forms, the Gi tribe endures an existence bereft of pleasureful purpose, with their only desire – death – forever out of reach. The lifestream has rejected them, and so they languish in limbo.
“Our ultimate salvation is cessation – it is nothingness. Our wish is not “to exist”, but rather, to no longer exist.”
Their drive for nonexistence leads them to seize the “greatest of materia” and imbue it with their “desire for freedom.” Thus did they create the Black Materia, the ultimate instrument of death and key to Sephiroth’s plans. Through the Gi’s suicidal aspirations, the entire planet might perish in flame. The only spell that can combat this comes from the White Materia, which Aerith fills with a wish to preserve her friends and the world itself. Nobody finds more joy in the pleasures of life, big or small, than Aerith. Again, we see the competing impulses of the pleasure principle and death drive shake the foundations of the world. Both follow the same “dominating tendency of mental life” that Freud describes as “the effort to reduce, to keep constant, or to remove internal tension due to stimuli” (67). Alleviation of pain, anxiety, and the inherent suffering of existence is the natural, shared goal of both libidinal and death instincts.
Odd as they may be, these readings of Rebirth helped me to appreciate much of its subtext. It roused me from my detached stupor and challenged me to use more than my Lizard Brain. The Gi’s folly, in particular, echoed in my mind. Had I not repeatedly returned to these disappointing games in my head, soaking in that unpleasant aura, spiraling through the same enraged patterns of thought? Did I not wish for Rebirth to be disgustingly alienating for me, spurning all sparks of hope that I might enjoy it? Could I not compel this love-hate relationship toward its death – its simple, conclusive cessation?
It’s hard not to laugh at such a cathexis with a video game – doubly so when my irrational investment in hostility somehow alerted me to the subliminal activation of frightening primal mechanisms. Well, good to recognize the problem, I suppose. At least I’ve got some level of self-awareness.
But unfortunately, that wasn’t quite the epiphany I wanted it to be. Frustration and anger at several creative decisions would continue to seep through the cracks.
It is, though.
FULL ESSAY: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2024/05/11/final-fantasy-vii-rebirth-a-world-beyond-anger/
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: A World Beyond Anger (Part Two)
II. On the Way to a Smile
Not only does Final Fantasy VII Rebirth decline to commit to the trajectory set by the end of the previous title, but it also seems to walk back on several of the questionable decisions made by the first installment. The cast’s prescient knowledge of the future story arcs? Gone. One of the first things that happens in Rebirth is Aerith explaining that the group lost all of their future memories after the fight with the Whispers in part one. So now the cast can just go through the same story beats in the same order with the same outcomes for 95% of the game. So much for changing your fate!
Moreover, the discretionary cutaways from death and ambiguous hints about the three Avalanche members’ survivals amount to almost nothing. Jessie and Wedge are, in fact, dead, just like in the original game. Biggs’s survival only happens in an alternate world that may or may not be purgatory. Zack is back, and he’s the centerpiece of the marketing. He even made it onto the cover of the game! And yet, his role in the story feels dramatically cut down from whatever might’ve been previously planned. He occupies scarcely an hour of screentime across the 100+ hour game. Completing the game unlocks the option to skip his sequences, which tells you how significant they are to the actual progression of the plot.
To me, all of this screams that the developers got cold feet on the apparent promise of a radically different adaptation, or that they never had a plan to begin with. I think opening the game with the overt retconning of Zack’s church scene from the end of Remake’s Intermission DLC indicates that the writing isn’t committed to a specific path.
I disagree with the notion that Remake’s climax alluded to only minor adaptational changes, rather than a fundamentally different story. Prior to the party vanquishing the avatars of fate, plenty of creative flourishes and alterations peppered the narrative. There would be no reason to disrupt “fate” (i.e. the direction of the story) if it just reaffirmed the adaptation’s existing ethos. The development team encouraged audiences to speculate on how different things could be. The ending of Remake could hardly be clearer: characters deleting future timelines that carried out OG events, “the future is always a blank page”, the party vanquishing a literal divine incarnation of “capital ‘D’ Destiny”, “the unknown journey continues”, etc.
Was it all meaningless? Was it disingenuous all along? Did they change their minds? Or did the developers just want to feed some controversy for extra publicity, plus a few brownie points for going meta? I’ll return to this point once we’ve discussed the ending of Rebirth. But it’s worth noting that more recent interviews have centered around how the Remake trilogy will eventually lead into Advent Children (2005) – in other words, any narrative digression that contradicts that film (previously thought to be a direct sequel to the 1997 game) must inevitably return to the status quo anyway. In an interview with GamesRadar+, producer Yoshinori Kitase said:
“We are finally going to link up with Advent Children, that is going to be part of canon. The overall storyline, the developments, will not go wildly out in a way that will not add up to Advent Children in the end. I don’t think anyone wanted that, that’s not what we’re looking to create here. [But] to make sure it doesn’t become stale and people know exactly where it’s going, [that it] doesn’t just follow the original word for word, we add in extra elements which add that little bit of doubt. Getting the right balance of that is so key. Ultimately, we’re not trying to change the Final Fantasy 7 story into something really different. The overall balance wouldn’t really allow for that anyway.”
To me, this just sounds like a normal description of an adaptation. Like… all of them, ever. It seems a far cry from the wild, uncharted frontier they recklessly set their sights on back in 2020. Unsurprisingly, I prefer this more conservative approach. Changes feel more natural, our heroes aren’t battling the literal ghosts of the plot, and everyone seems to be acting more in-character than they were throughout the third act of Remake. It might sound like I’m poking fun at Square Enix for backpedaling, and I am, to an extent. But I also view the conceit behind my interpretation of Remake’s ending to be a rhetorical gangrenous limb. Its amputation seems like a necessary course correction, and it helped me to enjoy the new game more than I expected. I’d say that for most of its duration, Rebirth ironically feels like a more faithful retelling than Remake did.
As with part one, I greatly enjoyed the environments, music, and combat design. Controlling characters feels more responsive, world traversal has more freedom, and quest design improved dramatically. It more closely resembles my conception of what a modern entry in the series should bethan Final Fantasy XVI (2023)does. A few of the 30+ minigames irritated me, but it felt nice to have new things consistently introduced to break the routine of the main gameplay loop. None of them match the standard set by Queen’s Blood, but what’s Final Fantasy VII without some annoying side activities?
I appreciate the effort put into creating mechanics used for single sequences, just as I admire the attention to detail in the recreation of old locales, monsters, and NPCs. The stretch of the adventure covering Junon, Costa del Sol, the Gold Saucer, Gongaga, and Cosmo Canyon in particular stood out as exceptionally well-crafted. Like the Wall Market chapter of Remake, these sections demonstrate the potential inherent in a faithful – yet creatively distinct – retelling. Even as a connection to the Compilation, which I generally dislike, Cissnei’s presence in Gongaga felt both plausible and satisfying to me.
On top of all of this, I consistently laughed along with Rebirth’s humor. It manages to catch that quirky, borderline surrealist tone of FF7’s classic gags, then mixes it with a bit of flare that would feel at home in the Yakuza series (2005-ongoing). From Red XIII’s disguised breakdance to Solemn Gus’s designated hype man to Junon’s pub exclusively catering to bald patrons, the wacky scenarios and odd predicaments that the characters find themselves in often provide more amusement than the main story. Constant opportunities for them to react to strange occurrences, banter with each other, and build their chemistry constitute the core of the game’s appeal.
Barret shines as the standout member of the party this time around. His arc, like the man himself, carries a lot of weight. I love how the game articulates the tragedy of his relationship with Dyne. The lack of catharsis for Barret at the end of it all feels both heart-wrenching and all too appropriate. In his eyes, he has yet to redeem himself, but with his friends’ help, that burden won’t be enough to bury him. Beyond just his personal pathos, Barret’s characterization radiates a versatility to which few others can compare. He offers comfort and protection to Cloud and Tifa upon their revisit to the facsimile of Nibelheim, applying his fatherly instincts to his companions. His camaraderie with Red XIII, which was practically nonexistent in the source material, proves to be one of the most compelling relationships throughout the new content.
Actually, Red XIII has improved across the board. I always thought the character showed promise, but he rapidly loses plot relevance after Cosmo Canyon in the original. Rebirth utilizes him more effectively by giving us glimpses into his private moments with characters besides Cloud. This results in a greater sense of interiority, and helps to put him on more equal footing with Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, and Barret, as far as narrative importance goes. The Gi vignette, which constitutes the entirety of Red’s arc in the original, now ties into the lore of the Black Materia in a really interesting way – perhaps the first expansion to the series’s mythology that I’ve actually enjoyed. This makes Red’s continued presence on the adventure feel more natural. More importantly, his determination to free the Gi from their deathless purgatory sets up an interesting new storyline to pursue in the third game.
As with Red XIII, Rebirth similarly capitalizes on Yuffie’s latent potential. She’s still an obnoxious, kleptomaniacal child, but now one with the unsettling ideals of a militant nationalist. Yuffie’s borderline jingoistic admiration for her country’s “interim government”, as well as her dream of enacting revenge on Shinra, grant her more depth than FF7 initially afforded her as a hidden bonus character. Rage and pain lie hidden beneath her exuberant exterior, and this makes her reckless stunts feel actually relevant to the story on both a surface and subtextual level.
I’m not automatically opposed to any deviation from the original game; in fact, I admire it whenever the writing takes care to tighten its screws. Through Yuffie, Rebirth ties its upcoming Wutai story arc into the newly foreshadowed Huge Materia (now called “Magnus”) and Weapon plotlines. Previously, these three stories had little or nothing to do with one another, and were somewhat tangential to the progression of the main scenario throughout the latter half of FF7. Bringing them all together like this stitches up some of the frayed threads of the original’s tapestry. It feels like a natural restoration that improves upon the fabric of the original, rather than rendering something akin to the Monkey Jesus fresco.
Of course, another highlight of Rebirth is Cloud and Tifa’s deepening bond. Square took this to unexpected (though not entirely unwelcome) territory. I think both characters are handled well, and the writing really sells both the turbulence and the unrelenting compassion of the relationship. I especially like the focus on Tifa’s propensity to people-please as a trauma response, which helps to facilitate tension in Cloud’s identity crisis mystery. It explores the very human roots of their faults without ever making them unsympathetic. Frankly, I feel like this game should be the final nail in the love triangle debate, but I’m sure shippers will find a way to continue. And Square doesn’t want that war to end. That would just be bad business.
Not only does Rebirth preserve the themes of mental health and the heavy psychosexual symbolism associated with it from the original, but it actually expands upon these motifs, getting more audacious than I ever expected. Much of the new material in story, particularly the expansions to Gongaga and Cosmo Canyon, inspired me to adopt a new perspective on what this project is trying to convey… and what it means to me personally.
FULL ESSAY: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2024/05/11/final-fantasy-vii-rebirth-a-world-beyond-anger/