I'm going to skip forward a few games and just go with the games that I beat from here on out. You heard enough about everything from Skyrim to FFX while I was playing through them on here without them being part of a "The Games I've Played" so I'm just going to start back up with this one and then write a new one any time that I finish off a game.
This game has been on my bookshelf for a long while. It was one of the first games that I saw on the shelf when I first got my PS3, and a year or so later I finally bought it because I wanted to play it, but it's been sitting on my shelf ever since.
For all of the hype that surrounds this game, and even with the backing of the big game companies EA and BioWare, I wasn't impressed.
It sounds interesting that you can have multiple story lines, and you can start off in different places, but no matter what you say to the NPC's no matter who you make fun of 99.99999% of the conversation trees don't matter. Near the very end of the entire story line it starts to matter a bit about what you decide to do and who you let stay with you and who you'd rather see dead, but even that doesn't really quite change the story line.
Then came the ANNOYING skill interface and team AI. Just like any good RPG, you get skills, abilities, spells, and tallents, and what's even better is that your entire group gets a good long list of them with you. But, the catch is that you only have hotkeys for SIX (that's right) six of them for any character.
To explain how annoying this is, let's take my mage character Adrillf (shocker I know that Adrillf would do that). He'd start off any fight ever with a spell that infected a monster and slowly eat away their HP and then make them explode in a gooey mess infecting and damaging anything around them when they died. After that spell, there were a few others that I'd throw out, and low and behold, by the time that I got done casting everything I had hotkeyed, half of them were on cool down and I was forced to keep at least two hotkeys on the lowest ability levels that I could find so that I wouldn't have to go through the annoying radial menu to pause the game and manually force my character to cast a spell.
I am sure that had I actually known what in the world I was doing, or if the AI had any basic programing sense at all, like if a character dies maybe the healer should try to rez them, my playthrough would be significantly less frustrating and more fun to play. I didn't know how bad it was until I restarted the game to clean up some trophies (one trophy for each of the different story introductions) and I played a rogue character that dual wielded and I was seriously shocked at the numbers of damage it produced at low level, and realized that the rogue I had who was dual weilding in my main game with Adrillf was doing almost NONE of what he could, but at least he was auto attacking and that was the most I could really ask for.
Side note- the relationship part of this is weird. Like, really awkward and weird. It doesn't fit into the story in any way, and it's just weird. Any time I would accidentally start talking to one of the team mates and they would get all relationshipy I'd just start spamming skip so I wouldn't have to deal with it because it was more comedy than it was romance.
It's an interesting game, but after a while you quickly start to see the railroads in the sandbox. You think that you have freedom and you can act whatever way you want, but in the long run it doesn't matter. You can pick just about whichever characters you want to be in your party, and it'll be okay; you can pick any side of any conflict, and you'll get the same results; and even if you really, really screw up your stat assignments, you can still kill the final boss without ever actually hitting him yourself with any gear that you brought to the final battle.
That's right! The final battle is entirely possible to win with no armor, maybe a steel dagger, and your entire team dead except for one character who will ocasionally chug down some health pots. It helps if you have a bit of armor and some fire resistance, but if you don't you'll just have to chug more pots. All you do is run away from the big dragon (spoiler, Dragon Age's final boss is a dragon) find a ballista, point it in the general direction of the dragon, and start hitting X. You'll notice that the ballista reloads at about the same speed as the dragon's flinch animation, meaning that you can flinch lock (yay for a RO term) the final boss with a siege weapon and never have to fire an arrow, swing a sword, or cast a spell at it to kill the dragon.
The story at first is interesting and even to the point where you want things to see what happens with the choices that you make, but after the fifth or sixth time that you're given a choice to make a response that could change everything you start to realize that it's all pointless. Your character is going to go down a specific path, is going to hit every single checkpoint, and that is the only way that the story is ever going to progress. You can try to do other things, and you can try to make the 'worst' ending possible, but there's ultimately only two different endings, and even those endings aren't really all that different when you get down to them. Compared to the dozen or so endings of Chrono Trigger, and the effects your choices make in that game for the rest of the game, this really doesn't compare.
Ultimately I could spend the 100 hours of playing through this game at least three more times with three seperate characters trying to 100% it three times (trying to hit level 20 with the different classes, as well as having all of the relationships (eww)) but I just don't want to. Once was enough, and for me, talking about an RPG involving magic, dragons, and blood spewing everywhere, that's a pretty grim verdict.
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