Not well. The game does not develop well at all.
From the seemingly never-ending number of inexplicably blocked/barred passages, to getting arbitrarily locked out of areas, to getting forcibly removed from areas, to the patented DA II encounter style of enemies appearing from thin air… the first act of this game has what should be a drop-worthy number of maluses. And yet, even so, I ended up starting up a second character to see how the big choice mid-act played out from the other side.
The thing about this choice is that the two available options are in no way equal. Which on the one hand is admirable (few AAA games are willing to actually force you to live with your choices), but on the other rather annoying.
If you pick Treviso:
- The opening sequence is new and fairly nonsensical.
- Dock Town’s map remains almost entirely the same, with only the Shadow Dragon base changing.
- Several of Dock Town’s merchants are removed.
- The north market’s blacksmith & artwork merchants, the bridge cheese merchant, the south docks Imperial Weave merchant, and the northeast bar merchant remain.
- Neve temporarily leaves the party, has reduced relationship gain, and cannot use her healing ability.
If you pick Dock Town:
- The opening sequence is a repeat of the prologue and abruptly ends with things half-finished.
- Treviso’s map gets heavily altered and even some of its enemy types change.
- All but two Treviso merchants are removed.
- The Pure Ore vendor and the leatherworker who sells armor appearances remain.
- Lucanis temporarily leaves the party and cannot be romanced or use his healing ability.
So the clear ‘best’ option is to pick Treviso, as not only do you lose a mere handful of merchants, but the Shadow Dragon vendor is the only one of the two you can raise to max rank at this point in the game (there’s not enough rare valuables to get the Crow vendor above third). If you do so however the whole thing feels kind of cheap and lackluster since Dock Town doesn’t really change post-attack.
This highlights the act’s main issue, which is that while the over-arching storyline is decent-to-good it falls flat on its face when it comes to the details. Consider the climax for example. A castle siege! Sounds like a great set-piece right? Wrong. Not only does it kick off by inexplicably introducing a child character who idiotically follows along through a war zone, but it progresses by having you haphazardly stumble from one bizarrely placed roadblock to another while constantly shouting “There must be another path through!”. It’s such a wasted opportunity.
And yet.
Yet, I cannot confidently say it’s a worse game than DA II or Andromeda. While it certainly features horrific traits from both, mechanically it’s not bad and as mentioned the direction of the plot as a whole (with the elves’ history being revealed) is actually somewhat interesting. I’m torn on whether or not to continue and be subjected to what I highly suspect will be a botched finale.
