The user who usually posts the weekly /c/games threads is absent/busy so I posted this on its own. I finished Dragon Age 2. And unfortunately, I think the gamers were right (it's kind of bad).
I beat Origins maybe 10+ years ago and really really liked it as someone who is also a fan of KotOR and other early Bioware/Obsidian games, etc. Veilguard just came out and I know that it has links to past games, even though you can only officially carry over decisions from Inquisition. But Inquisition lets you carry over choices from Origins and 2, so I decided to just pick up where I left off with the series to work my way up to the newest entry.
Spoilers below.
So much complaining about the Dragon Age games comes from 
talking about sex, gender, and what they would now call "woke shit". I could have a good faith discussion about how I think the player sexual characters are bad from a writing standpoint, but I think most of that gamer discourse started with Inquisition, which I've just started. Aveline, one of the companions of 2, explicitly rejects your advances and instead has you help her court another Kirkwall guard, who she ends up marrying. This was cute.
Dragon Age 2 is instead bad for a lot of design reasons.
It really does repeat the same handful of locations over and over and over to where I started recognizing areas that were supposed to be different. Most of the 'caves' are the same place as the Bone Pits mine 
, except with different doors filled with stone to block your access. There were like 4 'warehouse' locations, but were really all the same one. The Deep Roads locations were also the same. It's just all the same, even when it's supposed to be different. There were very few varied locales and the city of Kirkwall is just not very interesting, nor are the familiar sections like the Deep Roads, which were some of my favorites in Origins. The Dwarf Commoner start in that game was so cool.
The game also has some very weird difficulty spikes that were very frustrating. Most of the game was pretty easy and the main trick it has up its sleeve is just spawning 3 or 4 waves of goons. Once you think they're beat, more appear all around you, not usually from any specific direction. They just fall out of the air or jump over walls behind and beside you.
But specific enemies, like Qunari mages, can just one shot your whole party unless you focus them immediately upon them spawning in. Which is actually how you deal with most difficult enemies, by chain stunning and cc'ing them, if possible.
The other difficult enemies were in the DLC, with the final boss of The Legacy being difficult because of the boss mechanics needing you to navigate through obstacles with the atrocious AI pathfinding. This is the first time I've cheated in a game in 10+ years because I was stuck inside the DLC and couldn't just leave, power up, and come back later. After 6 or 7 attempts, I felt there was no chance I was going to 'get good' and turned on god mode because I felt like the developers who made this fight knowing their pathfinding was this bad did not respect me, respect my time, or have any sense of enjoyable boss mechanics. You'd probably find a dozen similar bosses in MMOs like WoW, but the big difference is that those actually have good movement mechanics and you don't have to corral 4 party members through them at the same time when they're determined to die.
I've beat all the Souls games, so I don't think was entirely a 'me' problem, even though I'm sure there are people who have beat that encounter on Nightmare difficulty.
The other final boss of the Mark of the Assassin DLC was difficult because you're forced to use Tallis, a terribly built rogue whose primary purpose is to showcase Felicia Day as an actress. Admittedly, the idea of other races being converts and followers of the Qun is an interesting idea that I want to explore more. But the character was actively detrimental to my party composition and just died a lot. This is mainly because the AI doesn't understand how to deal with characters like Tallis, a dual-wielding rogue that relies on building up combos, or using stealth, to do damage. It also can't play Blood Mages without killing them and trying to use Heal on them, when Heal doesn't work on characters in Blood Mage stance, without setting up individual Tactics that says "heal X party member at % health" and excluding the other Blood Mages. Anyway, I had to kite the boss around the arena for probably like 20 minutes with only my tank and my MC, a mage, alive to do damage.
The story had some ups and downs. It was a much more personally tragic story than anything like Origins, which had a lot more to do with saving the world. Instead, my main character's entire family dies gruesomely, one of her friends does some 
against the church (blowing up the entire thing and kicking off a civil war) and tricks her into being an accomplice, and they're left with essentially only (some of) their friends by the end of the game. I did like this more personal angle about a blight refugee trying to improve their standing in the world. But a lot of the side quests and companions don't land.
The big theme in the story is the Mage Question. In Ferelden, mages are forced into 'circles' when they are discovered to have a strong connection to the Fade (another universe created and abandoned by The Maker filled with jealous demons who want to control humans to experience their world and emotions). This happens even if they're children, and is done against their will, but often with the support of their families. This is because those mages with strong connections to Fade are susceptible to demonic possession without learning how to resist this. They're assigned their very own Church Officer known as Templars. In theory, the idea is to protect the mages themselves, society, and for the Templars to act as last resorts for the mages. They'll kill the mage if they end up being possessed. But certain factions within the templars are more like witch hunters, looking for signs of possession that aren't there, because they hate the idea of beings like mages existing at all. Their compromise is to magically lobotomize them, making them unable to use magic, but also doing away with all their emotions.
In Tevinter, a neighboring country, mages are in control under the title of 'magisters', which are particularly powerful mages. They also enslave their populace and turned their templars into bodyguards. The original magisters were mages who tried to enter the city of The Maker, defiling it, and starting off the first blight. They play the foil to the idea that mages are a universally oppressed class of people. While they don't feature much in the main narrative of 2, you do get a companion who was formerly enslaved by them, and who calls you out for showing too much mage sympathy. Such as by suggesting that the Templars shouldn't have treated the mages so harshly if they didn't want their church to get blown up. Sorry not sorry.
But the way this gets resolved is that you get to choose to help the Templars finally kill all the mages in Kirkwall, declaring them to be too far gone into the realm of blood magic and demons. Or you help the mages fight off the Templars to save their lives and hopefully get a message out to other Circles about how overboard the Templars are willing to go. During these final moments, your main mage contact, Orsino, turns into a stitched up gore demon because he feels like the cause is hopeless and that they're all going to die anyway. And as you fight through the city, you see countless demons corpses and fight them. Only once do you see a group of living mages that you can help fight off the Templars.
So in one way, the game tries really hard to get your to sympathize with mages and their plight, because they are oppressed and treated poorly. The Chantry is a disgusting organization that kidnaps children, bullies indigenous groups (the elves), and lobotomizes anyone that starts to question their leadership. But at the same time, it seems to say "hah, look at all these mages turning to demons, told ya so" with how the final battle is presented.
I still stand by the idea that the mages would not turn so freely to demons and blood magic if they were not treated lesser in the first place, and that individual blood mages are less of a threat to the world than an organization like the Chantry, or an organization of blood mages like The Magisters. Meaning the problem isn't mages, but the pursuit of power and the means by which someone seizes it (usually by stepping on the necks of others). But this isn't really consistent with the game and you're only given one dialogue option to really suggest that Templars are the cause of the issue for both them and for mages in Ferelden.
Instead you're laughed at for daring to help the people being oppressed by a tyrant woman (because it turns out all mages actually are demons afterall), Meredith, who turns out to be driven to greater levels of bloodthirst by possessing Red Lyrium that you came across earlier in the game. Which also ruins her character, as she at one point expressed frustration at her 'need' to kill all the mages, demanding that someone suggest to her a better solution and she'd gladly do it. Instead of a potentially complicated character with actual motivations, she's turned into an anime villain who backflips 20 feet into the air.
There were also a few bugs in the game I came across that were annoying. A certain robe that causes you to Stealth when hit turns off all your sustained buffs, which makes it entirely useless, because all my characters kept at least 2 that would affect the entire party. I don't think this was intended, as it was only equippable by my main character and it was made unusable for Blood Mages, since I had 5 different auras on through my essentially infinite mana pool. The game also crashed twice, but this could be due to playing on Linux through Proton.
I'm running out of steam so I can't recall anything else I wanted to say. I don't regret playing the game, but it's for sure a step down from Dragon Age: Origins in just about every department. Except movement. And I've realized this because I started Inquisition, which is where they've decided to give your character 'weight', meaning they turn slowly and control like you're driving a tank 
. It feels so horrible.
link but this isn't really picked up anywhere else. Predictably, the same disgusting people (referring to H3, Destiny, etc) who spread the dubious "Hasan shocked his dog" stuff don't care about this one, so it isn't all over the internet.
so after the Panda zoo and this, I'm out for good.
s here should recognize that gacha slop like Uma Musume also funds horse racing (the franchise is basically PR for the Japan Racing Association) and is only a small separation from betting at the track. It was obnoxious seeing the wave of people talking about it at launch and seeing it plastered all over gaming sites, Steam, etc. Most people probably don't think twice about it because horse girls in anime just 'makes sense' in a vacuum, but I want to bring more attention to the cruel industry by using that franchise and Hasan as a springboard.
My experience is limited to just Xi'an, which I spent a few months in. Almost nobody spoke more than a few words of English as soon as you moved outside the vicinity of the Terracotta Army, the city wall, etc.
This was years ago before Covid, but the vibe was still that random Chinese people were asking to take pictures with me because it was a novelty to see a white person visiting temples and stuff further outside the city.
A lot of the time, we didn't have guides or friends with us, so we got along by communicating with translation apps and asking strangers for help. At one point, we had a whole bus (like 12 people.were actually talking, it was wild) debating on which stop we should get off before someone said "Here!" and the driver ushered us off. Then a woman on the street pointed us in the direction of the place we wanted to go.
So, I would recommend it, but with the caveat that you have to be willing to put yourself out there a bit and talk to people, even if youre socially awkward like me. The language barrier helps dampen it somewhat, and we were usually laughing at each others inability to understand.