Dragon Age II

“When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor” – Paulo Freire.

Dragon Age II is a rare type of RPG: instead of offering an epic, episodic adventure, filled with exotic people and wondrous locales to explore, it has a single, almost barren location and a thematically focused story. Its reused assets and simple combat can get old fast, but the quality of the writing more than makes up for that.

You play as Marian Hawke, a character that you can rename and customize: you can even choose to make a white alpha male if you think like Ubisoft’s top executives or are just so inclined. The first time you see Hawke, she’s running away from home in the midst of a war: her king has died in battle against the fearsome Darkspawn, her lands have been overtaken by monsters, and she has no choice but to flee. Accompanying her family, she goes to the city of Kirkwall, where her uncle lives and is supposedly able to offer them asylum.

When they arrive at Kirkwall, however, they don’t get a friendly welcome. “We have enough poor of our own in the Free Marches. We don’t need you refugees piling up here like a middens heap!” a guard barks at them when Hawke’s family tries to enter the city. Hawke is an immigrant in Kirkwall – as one of the first achievements you can unlock interestingly celebrates – and, because of that, she’s treated poorly by the locals.

Refugees are outcasted in Kirkwall, grouped together in an old prison aptly called “the Gallows”. If they try to force their way into the city – and don’t have the necessary money, of course – they are quickly put down by angry soldiers. So, at the Gallows they remain, surrounded by huge statues of tortured slaves covering their faces in shame or pain, constructed to further oppress those that are locked up inside the prison.

The opening of Dragon Age II is a strong one. You have refugees being put in what are basically concentration camps by the guards of Kirkwall, waiting for ships to take them elsewhere, with no hope of this “elsewhere” being a safe place. It shows how barbarous and hypocritical this stance is: while the poor wait for their fate in the Gallows, the guards let some enter the city, but only those that are wealthy. Some people say money doesn’t bring happiness, but it can certainly ensure one’s survival in a capitalist culture. Hawke doesn’t have the money, but she has contacts, which only gets one so far: she indeed enters Kirkwall, but must work for a year to pay over her debt.

The narrative skips this year and comes back when Hawke is trying to join an expedition in the Deep Roads to earn some cash. The only way to do that – a dwarf named Varric explains to her – is to already have a lot of money and become a partner in that expedition, paying 50 sovereigns upfront. The game’s first act, then, is all about acquiring that coin. Hawke must take several jobs and assist several people if she wants to have a chance to move up in the world. She has some difficulty getting those jobs, however: Kirkwall, as one of the characters says, is a land with “lots of opportunity… if you’re the type the locals want.” Since one of the first merchants you can talk to calls you a “Ferelden street rat,” foreigners are hardly that type.

Kirkwall was a slave city once – before the slaves rebelled and killed a bunch of important people – and it still remains marked by oppression. It’s a city fortress, boasting walls instead of houses, with spikes everywhere in the poorer areas. It’s aptly barren, brown, and boring: it’s oppressive rather than welcoming. Fereldans like Hawke are called “immigrant pigs” by those who happened to have been born in a luckier place and are exploited at every turn by them. There’s a merchant, for example, that owns a mine plagued by dragons are is quick to reframe desperation as opportunity: although working in the mines is hazardous, to say the least, he claims that Fereldans are lucky to work for him, as others aren’t so generous as he is when it comes to choosing employees.

And it’s not just immigrants that get the short end of the stick in Kirkwall, as mages are also locked up inside a place called “the Circle” by people that fear their power. They say that they consort with Demons – some of them, after all, really do – and deal with blood magic, killing innocent people. Mages that are not in the Circle are called “apostates” and hunted down by Templars, who often abuse their position of power to massacre those they find in hiding. When an apostate is found by a Templar they’re lucky if they just end up imprisoned in the Circle, as Templars – very much like, idk, the police – can take the expression “to get away with murder” very literally when they confuse law enforcement with being a butcher and are protected in return.

And we have the Qunari: strong humanoid beings with menacing horns and strange eyes that have a curious socialist culture that values the collective good more than individuality. “The Qunari view their society as a single creature: a living entity whose health and well-being is the responsibility of all. Each individual is only a tiny part of the whole, a drop of blood on its veins,” the codex entry explains, “It is a life of certainty, of equality, if not individuality.” It’s not a surprise, then, that the offer of equality begins to sound alluring to those of the lower classes of Kirkwall, a city built on oppression. The Qunari start to convert people that are eager to embrace a life in which they are not shunned for arbitrary reasons, which greatly upsets the powerful – and religious – people of the city.

All this makes Kirkwall feel claustrophobic and overpowering – a feeling that is further enhanced by the fact the city is the main setting in the game: the player literally can’t escape it, always returning to it after completing their various missions. The story also benefits from taking place in a single location, as the city ends up functioning as a rope that ties each theme together, making the situation of the Fereldans, the Qunari, and the mages speak closely to each other, instead of being isolated events in different parts of the world.

The story in Dragon Age II is all about systematic oppression. There’s corruption and bigotry everywhere and they often appear together, as these things tend to go hand in hand. There are militias forming rallies “against the foreigners that infest Kirkwall,” there are Templars hunting and killing mages without abandon, and Magistrates protecting their own instead of delivering justice – you even meet a demon named Justice that, despite being more vengeful than just, is still much more just than the judges in Kirkwall. Again, it’s no wonder that people flee to the Qunari, seeing in them the only way out of that rotten society.

The enemies you fight in Dragon Age II rarely are the one-dimensional Darkspawn of the first game: Kirkwall’s monsters are of its own making. You see people that are pushed to a life of violence because they are refused jobs and dignity. You see mages making deals with demons just to get back at the Templars, who are eager to punish even those that are innocent.

You get to witness firsthand how a discourse of prejudice against a certain group is constructed: the city commander, Meredith, often justifies Templar brutality on the basis that the only alternative is to let mages run wild and kill everyone in the city. For her, you either let the Templars kill indiscriminately or let crime run amok in Kirkwall. “If you cannot tell me another way, don’t brand me a tyrant,” she challenges a mage, without realizing that it is her binary worldview that blocks any real solution. And so law and order becomes synonym for oppression and a desire for revolt is intensified.

Meredith often picks one crime or attack that happened in Kirkwall and generalizes it, linking it to the identity of that group: all mages are blood mages, and all blood mages murder innocents, just because a few did.  In turn, she consolidates her power, being the spokesperson for that fear while offering herself as the cure for the disease she herself helped to create: if people want to control the mages, they have to resort to Meredith, the only one deemed capable of putting a stop to their nefarious plans. And so oppression intensifies, transforming Kirkwall into a pressure pot of social inequality.

Hawke’s companions, which are a great bunch of troublesome misfits, perfectly encapsulates the main themes of the game. Their healer, Anders, is an apostate. The sweetest person in the group, the aloof Merrill, is a blood mage. The angry elf, Ferris, is a former slave. It’s actually surprising that we don’t get a Qunari companion.

They all fight alongside each other but also against each other: one would expect minorities to offer support to one another, but as one Brazilian thinker once pointed out, sometimes the oppressed want to resemble the oppressors. Anders fights for liberation with everything he’s got, trying to stop the Templars and free his colleagues from the Circle, but chastises Merrill at every turn, claiming that it is people like her that give mages a bad reputation. Fenris was once a slave but agrees wholeheartedly that mages should be locked up in the Circle – his old master was, after all, a mage. Their banter, then, tends to be overly aggressive, with one of them poking at the other’s emotional wounds with the clear intent of hurting them. Even their input tends to get cruel at some points. In a certain quest, for example, in which a character very dear to a blood mage dies, Anders’ response to the death is to say to the blood mage that the world became poorer because that person died instead of the blood mage – and Fenris agrees. The companions in Dragon Age 2, save one or two exceptions, are all tragic characters that are fighting against oppression while making their duly contributions to it.

“Uprising” would have been a great subtitle for the game, as the narrative in Dragon Age II paints violent revolution as the inevitable conclusion of years of oppression. This revolution can be seen in the city’s history with the slave revolt, and this history seems to about to repeat itself: everywhere you go in Kirkwall, you hear that the mages and the Qunari are ticking bombs just waiting for their time to go off. Peace is portrayed as an impossibility when oppression is at play, as it benefits just one side.

The only problem with the story is the narration by the dwarf Varric, who is telling the game’s story to a mysterious interrogator. His narration can indeed be very funny sometimes, especially when the game is playing with how unreliable he is as a narrator – Varric is, after all, admittedly a liar: “There’s power in stories, though. That’s all history is: the best tales. The ones that last. Might as well be mine,” he confesses to Hawke at a certain point. But it doesn’t serve the story thematically in any way, shape or form, functioning more like a crutch that allows the writers to quickly sum up the events when they want to make some jumps in time. It even fails to amount to anything important in the end, offering no pay off to the interrogation.

Talking about problems, Dragon Age II suffers heavily from repetition. There’s only one “dungeon layout” for each area, which is reused hundreds of times despite the context. So, every mansion in Hightown will look exactly the same, and Hawke you will discover that, surprisingly, the people she is looking for are hiding in the exact same cave as the last two hundred bandits she hunted and killed until that point.

Combat doesn’t fare much better either, with just a couple of combat skills at your disposal at any given time and little to no strategy at play: if you just use your most powerful skills you are guaranteed to win basically every fight. Actually, it is worse: especially at the beginning, there will be no strategy at all available for the player even if they want to make things more difficult for themselves, as the few skills available will have no synergy with each other, and every enemy encounter is basically the same. Later on, strategies will come from a few possible combos: some attacks cause more damage if the enemy is stunned, frozen, or something along these lines, but Dragon Age II doesn’t push this the way it should. Someone playing on normal can safely ignore this side of combat:  players can just spam the attack button while they wait for their skills to be available again, and then use them mindlessly – especially if they are controlling a warrior. Enemies don’t require different strategies and practically all encounters involve groups of enemies, which make attacks that hit more than one enemy much more useful than the others. Some fans mourned the loss of the isometric camera from the first game, but it would have been of no use here, as everything is more streamlined and also dull.

Dragon Age II is a strange sequel. Instead of getting bigger, but not necessarily better, it offers a more focused, densely packed story that benefits from taking place in a single location. Its combat system could certainly have been more complex and engaging, but the quality of its story is unquestionable.

December 04, 2020.