By Charlotte Reber’s own admission, Dragon Age II is a somewhat counterintuitive choice for a Boss Fight book. After all, Dragon Age: Origins is the main famous, well-regarded game of the series, a fantasy epic role-playing game in the Bioware house style that takes place in an original fantasy setting. Reber’s book, while mostly a depiction of the Dragon Age II writers’ room, is framed in the context of Reber explaining why it is that this game, specifically, struck a chord with her, motivating her to grab a copy years later despite her being a part of the mushy majority that vaguely liked Dragon Age: Origins but never actually finished it.
Dragon Age II, both the book and the game it’s about, functions as a sort of roundabout story about a story in this way. Why Dragon Age II specifically has this odd character focus is largely due to corporate drama. Electronic Arts bought Bioware in 2007, started paying more attention to the acquisition in 2009 as its long-term MMORPG plans started to take shape, and just sort of arbitrarily demanded that Bioware release a new Dragon Age game by March of 2011 because they noticed that Bioware didn’t have anything else scheduled for that specific year. Reber namedrops The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as a similar kind of spiritual successor and even just going from the rushed timeline, there are definite parallels to that Boss Fight book too.
The relatively unambitious replication of the prequel’s game engine features in both too, but the main aspect of Dragon Age II that intrigues Reber is the scaled down plot, which doesn’t feel any less dramatic despite having far less intense world-ending stakes. In Reber’s argument, it’s precisely because Dragon Age II has these lesser stakes that it’s much easier to identify with the characters. The whole game is framed around character interactions, specifically, the dwarven hustler Varric who narrates the full story to an inquisitor, a metatextual thread that begs a lot of questions about the narrative’s general accuracy, even if it never quite gets to the absurdity of the opening sequence.
Reber attributes the depth of the story to the character conflicts because, well, because that’s the main thing the writers had to work with. While the book never really discusses what was going on from the programming side, it’s a clear, ever-present concern from the writers how they can’t really script anything all that ambitious from a gameplay perspective because the technical team just didn’t have the time to expand on the game’s engine in an especially impressive way. Even the conceit of the game mostly taking place in a single town, with a lot of refused locations outside that town, is only just barely justified by the writers coming up with a three-act structure, allowing the passage of time to let the town feel different despite mostly just looking at the same.
The Dragon Age II Boss Fight book is oddly open about the game’s shortcomings, certainly more than any other Boss Fight book I’ve read to date. The game’s reception, far from being a triumph, instead becomes an almost anticlimactic disappointment, with fans trashing the title. What makes this ambiguous tone especially weird is that Reber dedicates a lot of energy to emphasizing that this was an early example of bigotry in gaming, tying that practice to Gamergate years later. Yet there’s no real sense of perspective about how much gamers were criticizing the game, rather than the story specifically, or how representative any of the more bigoted responses really were. It all comes off as a very stupid Internet argument, and for whatever it’s worth, Reber does discuss the topic so little it’s not clear she thinks there’s really that much to be said about it either.
In the end, Dragon Age II is one of the more flawed Boss Fight books I’ve read, on account of the fact that I’m still not entirely sure what the game is really about, from a story perspective. Reber discusses the storybuilding from a fairly mechanical perspective, as might be expected from a person who is described on the back of the book as a writer of fiction, but doesn’t integrate those mechanics into the game’s actual content as well as Tremblay’s recent tome on Life Is Strange. At least part of this is a problem with the script of Dragon Age II, which as Reber notes, can’t really be interpreted on its own as if it were a screenplay because there are too many potential variations between major plot points.
In short, both in book and game form, Dragon Age II is a series of difficult challenges not quite convincingly surmounted, even if the high points are strong enough that they’re easier to remember than the weaknesses. Indeed, the oddities and the contrasts engendered by these issues make up a lot of the charm. It’s always worth remembering that distinctive games with personality tend to weather historical perspective better than technically better generic ones.
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