After spending a little more than 128 hours with Dragon Age: Inquisition, I've completed it! Like most games that I spend 100+ hours on, I got to a point where I was getting ready to be done, and I had to define what I wanted to make sure to finish.
I completed nearly all side quests that didn't involve maps or gathering useless shit for requisitions. I really wish I could turn off the requisition requests, quite frankly. My need to talk to anything with an exclamation mark made me do way more of these than necessary. All it did was rob me of crafting materials and annoy me by the end of it. Having 3 total requests per map seems like it would be sufficient, but procedurally generated bluh seems the way to keep people grinding, I guess.
I went through all the achievements and figured out which ones I wanted to get. The one for murderlizing all 10 dragons seemed like a must. When I decided this was my goal, I think I killed like 6 in one sitting. I really enjoyed the dragon battles. They were sufficiently epic for a fight with a dragon, and if you went in under leveled, it would wreck your face. The battles each lasted at least a half an hour and took potion and ability management to keep the battle from turning south. There was one in particular that I had to turn off my party auto-using potions. YOU DON'T DRINK THAT UNLESS I TELL YOU TO DRINK THAT! Without that setting, Dorian literally downed 10 potions by himself during the first couple minutes of that battle. Dude! Selfish!
A couple of those dragons, in fact, were way more difficult than big bad boss man Corypheus at the end. I wasn't too upset by that though. I had leveled up to beastliness, had an awesome sword I called Boomstick, and was a regular at sticking a boot heel up evil's ass by then. I was, however, extremely disappointed in a P0 type really fucking bad bug I encountered during the final boss fight. I think because I was in Tactical Mode when a cutscene was triggered, all the characters were stationary while the audio and camera continued on with the cutscene. You couldn't tell what was happening. You'd just see the background of the shot and a motionless dragon or no character at all. Corypheus was talking mad shit, but all I could see was the orb he was holding flailing around in the air by itself. This, as you can imagine, kind of killed the mood. Instead of enjoying my victory, I was thinking how far I'd have to go back to replay that bit or if the autosave would save me or if I just wanted to watch the cutscene on Youtube and be done with it. I ended up going the Youtube route.
After the 2 or 3 bugged in-battle cutscenes, things went back to working. I got to see the ending without issue. But still...kind of disappointed, Bioware QA. The tutorial needs to be solid to hook a person initially, and the ending needs to be solid to reward the player with some sort of payoff. I'd be way more accepting of buggy shit somewhere in the creamy nougat center of the game rather than in the supposed to be most epic bit.
I did enjoy how the epilogue was handled...the fact that it had an epilogue and had Morrigan tell each bit of the tale. Regarding my particular epilogue, I'm kind of sad I accidentally ruined Leliana and made her a super hard-ass. If I would play this game again, I'd try to steer her away from her throat slittin' ways. She seems a little scary for a now holy lady.
Overall, I'm pleased with the game. The story was confusing as fuck sometimes, but there were several whaaaaaaaat moments that were pretty excellent. I will say that I don't think I was as attached to my NPC party in this game as in Origins. Cassandra was my buddy, Dorian and Varric were usually with me, but there were a lot of characters that I didn't use much at all. Solas was judgey as fuck, Vivienne was stuck up, Blackwall pissed me off when I didn't take him along on one quest line. He got put in timeout for whining once. I'm sure I missed out on some humorous banter out in the field by not switching up my party more, but I liked my A Team. All in all, I enjoyed Inquisition far more than Dragon Age II. Dragon Age: Origins still owns my heart, but the scale and look of the environments of Inquisition are so huge and pretty, it's certainly fighting for its position. Any game that I obsessively play as much as this one made me do is a winner in my book.
