Critical Corner: Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Other Recs

Most people don’t come to this newsletter, if they come at all, for game reviews. But I have some scant thoughts about Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which had me hunkered down in my apartment for a full four days, that I would rather not have in my brain. So here they are, along with some recommendations.

Things I LIked About The Game

• It feels like a Mass Effect game. Two of my favourite games are Mass Effect 2 and 3, for different reasons. The tight focus of 2, specifically focussed on building a team of specialists to pull off a suicide mission, is one of the smartest things BioWare has ever done, and it’s a shame that until The Veilguard they haven’t capitalised on it. While this game has a strong overarching plot, it is absolutely driven by the characters and their relationships.
• The character writing, in general. Usually in a BioWare game there’s one or two characters that I don’t vibe with (Sera and Blackwall in Inquisition, especially) but in this game I pretty much was compelled by all of the characters. I adored Emmrich’s fear of mortality, was genuinely won over by Taash’s questioning of their gender, and even Bellara, the closest the game gets to Whedon quippery, had a genuinely fascinating relationship with the history of the Dalish clan. I saw someone mention that they’d like to see credits for each questline/character, similar to what Kojima did with Metal Gear Solid 5.
• The gameplay! The Veilguard basically plays like a Dynasty Warriors game with RPG elements. Which is to say it’s very fun and tactile. (It helps hugely that you can adjust enemy health, some of those fights are long.)
• It’s very gay. Self-explanatory here!
• There is no open world, not really. I recently played Inquisition for an unpublishable amount of hours, and I think that turning this particular franchise towards an open world was a mistake (to say nothing of Mass Effect: Andromeda, which I couldn’t even finish). With The Veilguard, BioWare has gone back to relatively small, explorable, hubs which match their styles much better. Nobody’s going to top The Witcher 3, which arguably had the best open world of all time, so there’s no point even trying.

Things I Didn’t Like So Much

• Neve. I’m not quite sure what it is, but it’s the first time in a video game that I’ve been unnerved at the disconnect between writing, animation and vocal performance. Neve is written as a hard-as-nails yet quippy detective type, but Jessica Clark’s vocal quality overshoots the stoic deadpan to end up as quite affectless. The mo-cap animation seems to be overcompensating for this, so Neve feels markedly more animated than any of the other companions. It’s a shame because Neve is part of quite a few plot crucial moments, and a few of these really missed because she looked and sounded slightly off.
• It feels like a new series. Part of the thrill of Dragon Age, and the aforementioned Mass Effect, is that your choices mattered. To have a sequel that barely carries anything over, and also subtly retcons villainous groups from previous games, is a disappointment. It’s almost certainly necessary, given that most people who are playing The Veilguard likely haven’t touched any of those other games in the decade between games, but as someone who has invested 15 years into this series, it’s inevitably disappointing.
• I don’t count this too harshly against it – and it might be because I am a very different person than the person I was when I started playing Dragon Age at 19 – but the moment the credits rolled I had absolutely zero desire to go back to it. It’s potentially the lack of any new game plus, or any way to carry over a character or design to a new game. It’s definitely not that I think my next experience with the game will be identical, because for whatever flaws The Veilguard has, it is definitely responsive to the choices of the players.

Other Things I’ve Consumed (and Would Recommend!)

• I’ve been on a stint of watching network TV shows recently, and I’ve settled on two: There’s Matlock, where Kathy Bates plays a lawyer called Matlock, in a universe where the original show existed as a TV show. She is ostensibly coming back to work after a messy divorce but there’s a twist which is truly ludicrous that makes the show way more entertaining than it should be. The other show is High Potential, which stars Kaitlin Olson (one of the most watchable actors on TV) as a high potential individual who helps police solve cases by being extremely observant and knowledgeable. Are either of these excellent shows? By no means. But they’re damn fun.
• I read the new Elizabeth Strout, Tell Me Everything. And hear me well, did I need to read a book where Strout’s former protagonists Lucy Barton and Olive Kittredge come together and share stories? Absolutely. It’s not her best work – I think that still goes to My Name is Lucy Barton – but Strout is the absolute GOAT at this kind of work.
• Monster, the 2023 film from Hirokazu Kore-eda, is as delicately wrought and acutely observed as anything he’s ever done. I only watched it last night, and the thing that sticks with me most is Sakura Ando (also wonderful in Love Exposure, the best four hour film you’ll ever watch) as a single mother.
• The new album by The Cure, Songs of a Lost World, is ridiculously good.

Things to Read

• Just one from me this week, but I’m one of those weird people who loves reading advice for problems I don’t have. I can’t recommend Slate’s wildly robust advice columns, including Dear Prudence, any more highly.

Self-Promo

• I’ve done a bit of writing for Ensemble recently, including this endorsement of Instagram Reels, this write up of the Arts Laureates Party, a profile of visual artist August Ward, and a feature on the style of the NZ Trio. 

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