its so strange…. this game didnt change me. it was like…. normal. natural. i was able to kinda play myself. be silly and crazy and stupid and pathetic. and kim stood by. and ppl were a bit weirded out or thought i was stupid or even made fun of me, but? it was still fine! i still solved the case. i still connected to people. i even laughed w ppl i thought were jerks. i managed to befriend ppl who wanted to beat me up. this game allowed me to be my pathetic self and still do my thing. its so awesome i wanna cry. nothing is gonna compare now no other rpg can do that. damn. im not a hero… not a saviour of the world…. nope, just a pathetic, sad guy who gets high and drunk and threatens to kill himself but who can also help people. in small ways. its so…. real. i really like how they did the characters.

even compl jerks. you cant hate all of them completely. they are people. some of them are stupid fucking racist people. some of them are very nice and v lowkey racist people. some of them are huge jerks but justified cuz they care about one thing a lot. this game is a love letter to humanity

spoilery below

and i LOVE how basically EVERYTHING i did mattered. every thing! every single thing! even if it seemed stupid and pointless and like a waste of time! talking to those two old guys playing boule? it mattered!

and i loved how.... real the people were. all of them. they really were. i think a lot of people would have written a lot of these characters very, very, very differently. i was mad that evrart was that way. but he was real. and that made... everything, every conversation, every decision more real, because everything was complicated, just like in real life. theres ideology and political theory and theres reality. theres a really, REALLY nice old lady. but shes racist. lowkey. but she is. and thats.... its disappointing, but its real, you know? what are you gonna do? stop talking to her? but shes so nice. and theres an interesting quest. these conflicting feelings - so real! just like in real life. do you stop talking to your nice neighbour because she made a racist comment? its messy. and then you meet complete jerks and you already write them off, you are basically waiting for your chance to "pay them back", but hey, look, they are actually decent.

the secret is like.... getting to know them and learning about the one thing they care about the most.

and you can go and try to build communism (wooo, 0.0002%!!) and you meet these young guys, its just. yeah. thats exactly how it is. fucking beans.

and the thing is: you gotta work with them. all of them. even the jerks. even the corrupt assholes.

because you cant burn bridges with every bad person. because they are all part of society, whether we like it or not. and its not like you are without fault. ur a fucking pig, as some love to point out. thats done. cant change that, no matter how much u want to, lol. the past is the past and u gotta move on.

and u can talk all u want all day long. what matters is what u do.

i keep thinking about cindy. standing on the outside hallway, looking at the city, at the people - people she hates. right below the radical youth hangout. thinking about the perfect, perfect slogan. and the two communist students, judging her for not being educated. in the end, shes the one who does something.

anyway. its nice to play a game where u are the literal incarnation of karl marx. (its canon, okay?)

For my current Dragon Age playthrough, I decided it would be fun to recreate the very first character I ever made for this series, Jolene Cousland. Human noble, rogue, archer, flaming locks of auburn hair, coming to steal your man, etc. I played her on console and never kept any record of her sliders, so I had to recreate her face from naught but a grainy photo of my TV screen, but I think I nailed her.

So, some fun anecdotes from that first playthrough, and things I'm doing differently for this one:

I played Origins not long after it first came out. Mr. Apocalypse was playing it, and said, "I think you'd like this game," as I was just getting into RPGs and had already fallen down the Fallout rabbit hole. I picked it up and was hooked. I could not put this game down. I loved the story, I loved the characters, I loved the romances (this was my first game with romances), I loved everything.

I was also terrible at it. I'd never played this type of game before, I didn't understand tactics or damage types or most of the abilities. ("Why didn't you just read the descriptions, Anne?" I was playing on console. Bold of you to assume I could read any of that on my TV screen. :P ) On my first attempt, I specced Jo as an archer... and got as far as the Fade. Where I ran out of health poultices. And promptly got my ass kicked so badly I finally quit and restarted the whole game. This time, I split Jo's abilities between archery and dual weapon, so I would be better prepared to fight without a party.

I got through the Fade.

I got all the way to "Nature of the Beast" before I got stuck again. I could not win that battle against Zathrian. I even looked up a walkthrough, and realized I'd be in a much better position if I had given Alistair Cleanse Area, buuuuut I hadn't. I had been playing on Normal, but I finally swallowed my pride and dropped it to Easy so I could get past that battle.

I made it to endgame, and then I got my ass kicked again... by the Archdemon. I had been avoiding looking up any spoilers or walkthroughs ahead of time, and I had no idea what I was doing wrong, but my whole party kept dying and we were barely doing any damage to that stupid dragon, so I looked up the strategy page on the wiki, and that's how I learned that the Archdemon is immune to basically everything except nature damage, and deals massive spirit damage with its blue fire breath.

Okay.

I had not planned for that at all. As mentioned above, I hadn't even really understood damage types, never mind planned my builds around them; I hadn't stocked Arrows of Filth; I had not stacked spirit resistance; I had not payed all that much attention to my mages' spells. I was in no way prepared for this battle.

I restarted the game again from the beginning.

This time I saved all my Arrows of Filth for the final battle, and gave Morrigan a bunch of nature damage spells. (And also, by this point I was starting to understand how to use tactics and keep party members alive.)

I beat the Archdemon! Finally!

And though I pretty ready for a break at that point, I just knew I was going to come back and play all the other origins at some point. And I did.

So, coming back to Jolene now, I have beaten Origins... five more times (maybe six? there might have been another old console playthrough I'm forgetting about). I've gotten in the habit of playing on Easy or at the most Normal with my newer characters so I wouldn't be constrained by the difficulty levels of the main quests and could mix up the order all I wanted, but I know this game pretty damn well by now and I felt like it was time to give myself more of a challenge.

So I'm playing on Hard! And I went back to Jolene's original archery-only build.

I was really curious to see if I could get through the Fade now as an Archer. I didn't bother planning ahead either--I went in with like one health poultice. And I did indeed get my ass kicked in the initial battle with "Duncan" and the other "Wardens," but with some strategic use of bombs, I got through it. I also learned the hard way that Summon Creature doesn't work in the Fade.

Once I got past that part, I realized that it was possible to stealth past most of the enemies (particularly the ones that were clustered, making for very difficult solo battles) until I started to collect the transformation abilities with their different abilities. Once I had those, it was mostly a matter of figuring out which form had the best attacks for the enemies in question, and switching back and forth between them until everyone was dead. I genuinely don't know what I would have done without Stealth; that ability was the real MVP in the Fade.

My primary party on this run is Dog, Alistair, and Wynne. I have a tendency to really under-utilize Dog and I decided that Jo was going to be a very attached to her mabari and take him everywhere. I'm actually getting a lot of mileage out of Dread Howl (which stuns enemies in its radius) and Overwhelm, which knocks an enemy to the ground and attacks repeatedly. Alistair is the Boyfriend, so he gets to come too. And Wynne is the healer. She can deal a bit of damage, mostly in the realm of knockdowns and immobilizing, but mostly I'm keeping her there to heal. This time I'm trying not to focus so much on hoarding health poultices but on using Wynne's abilities as much as possible to keep everyone alive. This also means that I spend a lot of time micromanaging Wynne in battles, but I'm basically micromanaging everyone in the tougher battles. It's such a different experience, rather than just clicking to attack and letting everyone do their own thing until something goes wrong, instead manually directing every turn and constantly watching the health bars. The added difficulty also gives me a lot more reason to actually use bombs and traps and so forth; I've always made use of poisons with my rogues because they're relatively easy to make, but on Easy playthroughs I tend not to both much with the other stuff and sell a lot of unused crafting components I pick up along the way. Now I'm buying recipes instead of poultices, and experimenting with traps (which so far I don't love, but maybe I just haven't figured out their ideal applications yet).

I'm having a lot of fun. This game has given me so much enjoyment over the years, and I'm both nostalgically enjoying revisiting my first character, and loving the fact that after all these years, this game still has new things to offer me.

I don't know who my Hawke's going to be for this world state! My first two playthroughs of DA2 were the default Hawkes (very unlike me, I know; it was around the time I first dipped my toes into the fandom and I think I sort of caved to all the "default Hawkes are best" mindset that was floating around at the time, and yes the default Hawkes are cool, but I do ultimately prefer to make my own characters). The first Hawke that was really "mine" was Alessandra. So... maybe someone new? I think I'm going to be romancing Isabela, but beyond that I have no idea.

Once I get to Inquisition, though, I'm going to be picking up Calla Cadash again. My first Inquisitor, and the one I never finished. I'm going to remake her on PC, and give her the full playthrough she deserves.

I'm really looking forward to that.