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.

We play as Marian Hawke, a character who we can rename and customize: we can even choose to make her a white alpha male if we happen to think just like Ubisoft’s top executives or are just so inclined (who doesn’t make bad choices, after all). The first time we 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 can offer them asylum.

When Hawke arrives at Kirkwall, however, she doesn’t receive 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 Hawke’s family when they try to enter the city. Hawke is an immigrant in Kirkwall – as one of the first achievements we 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 get into the city but don’t have the necessary money to buy their way in (the good immigrant is the rich immigrant, after all), they are quickly put down by angry soldiers, who are too happy to have found authorized prey for them to hurt and hunt. So, at the Gallows most immigrants 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. We 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 the city’s stance is: while the poor wait for their fate in the Gallows, the guards let the wealthy enter Kirkwall. Some people say money doesn’t bring happiness, but it can certainly bring equally important things, such as safety and peace of mind. Hawke doesn’t have money, though, but at least she knows someone on the inside, even though her uncle can only get her so far: with his help, Hawke indeed manages to get inside Kirkwall, but now she must work for a year to pay off a debt.

The narrative skips over 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. But, as expected, she has some difficulty getting those jobs: Kirkwall, as one of the characters says, is a land “of opportunity… if you’re the type the locals want.” Since one of the first merchants we can talk to calls Hawke a “Ferelden street rat,” immigrants are hardly that type.

Kirkwall was a slave city once – before the slaves rebelled and killed their masters – and it remains marked by oppression to this day. Living up to its name, Kirkwall is more a fortress than a city, boasting walls instead of houses, which are even adorned by spikes in the poorer areas. It’s blandly 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 who owns a mine plagued by dragons, for example, who is quick to reframe desperation as opportunity: although working in his 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 who get the short end of the stick in Kirkwall, as mages are also locked up inside a place called “the Circle” by people who fear their power. They say that mages consort with demons – some of them, after all, really do – and deal with blood magic, killing innocent people – some of them, after all, really do. Mages who aren’t in the Circle are basically on the run, being 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, I don’t know, the police – can take the expression “to get away with murder” very literally when they confuse law enforcement with being a butcher. That’s the thing about minorities becoming authorized prey: sadists have a field day.

And we have the Qunari: strong humanoid beings with menacing horns and strange eyes who 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. The Qunari, then, start to convert people who are eager to embrace a life in which they are not shunned for arbitrary reasons… but this ends up greatly upsetting 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 that the city is the main setting in the game: we literally can’t escape it, always returning to it after completing our various quests and missions. The story greatly 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 – we even meet a demon named Justice who, 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 we fight in Dragon Age II rarely are the one-dimensional Darkspawn of the first game: Kirkwall’s monsters are of its own making. We see people who are pushed into a life of violence because they are refused jobs and dignity. We see mages making deals with demons just to get back at Templars, who are eager to punish even those who are innocent.

We get to witness firsthand how a discourse of prejudice against a certain group is built: 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. There are just extreme options and imaginary enemies. “If you cannot tell me another way, don’t brand me a tyrant,” she challenges a mage, without realizing that it’s precisely her binary worldview that blocks any real solution. And so, law and order becomes a 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 the group that committed it: 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 healing balm 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 the city into a pressure pot of social inequality.

Hawke’s companions, who are a great bunch of troublesome misfits, perfectly encapsulate the game’s main themes. 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, it’s tragic when the desire of the oppressed turns into resembling the oppressor. 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 who 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 just became poorer because their friend died… instead of them – and Fenris also agrees. The companions in Dragon Age 2, save one or two exceptions, are all tragic characters who 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 history seems to be about to repeat itself: everywhere we go in Kirkwall, we hear that the mages and the Qunari are ticking bombs just waiting for their time to expire. And so, oppression turns peace into an impossibility, and the bombs eventually go boom.

The only problem with the story is the narration by the dwarf Varric, who is retelling the events to a mysterious interrogator. His narration can indeed be very funny at times, 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 his narration 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 meaningful payoff 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 will discover, to our great astonishment, that the people she is looking for are hiding in the exact same cave as the last two hundred bandits she killed.

Combat doesn’t fare much better either, with just a couple of combat skills at our disposal at any given time and little to no strategy at play: if we just use our most powerful skills, we’re guaranteed to win basically every fight. Actually, it’s 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, however, 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 system the way it should. Someone playing on normal can safely ignore this side of the combat altogether:  we can just spam the attack button while we wait for our skills to be available again. Enemies don’t require different strategies and practically all encounters involve groups of enemies, which makes AoE attacks 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 much more streamlined and also dull.

Honestly, I could write many more paragraphs about this combat system and the weird difficulty spikes, but I would be wasting everyone’s time. Combat is not the point in Dragon Age II, and the fact that it has a lot of combat encounters nonetheless is precisely the game’s main fault.

Dragon Age II is a fascinating 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.

March 21, 2025.