Too Many Inquisition Feels

If you play video games, or even if you don't and you just like to think about video games (I don't know, someone might??), then you've probably thought about what your ideal video game would be like. I know I think about it a lot! Mass Effect is my favorite video game series and probably one of my favorite stories of all time. But it's missing something. It's perfect, I mean I would never change it and it's an experience I will never forget, but let's be real. There are no blonde templars in Mass Effect. And there are no masquerade balls or castles or bards in taverns playing songs about your adventures.

And all of that is in Dragon Age: Inquisition, which IF YOU'VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK is BioWare's latest installment in the Dragon Age series, and came out last Tuesday. So naturally I've done nothing with my life since then but play it. BECAUSE IT IS PERFECT.

This isn't going to be a review, because I'm only about 45 hours into the game and nowhere near finished, but I just have to write about it because it's swallowing me whole and I need to express my feels before I explode. I'm still not even sure this game is real, that's how good it is. I started playing when I was in the throes of a cold, so I was all delirious and kept thinking, "Is this really happening?? Is this game really this good?!" Yes. It is real! Unless I'm dreaming right now!

Just. This world is enveloping me so completely it's as real to me as ~real life~. It's open world, so you can pretty much explore wherever you want in a zone, unless there's a big ol' mountain in your way, or a dragon that you're too scared to try to fight ("run awayyy!"). That means it feels more like you're truly existing in a fully realized world that's there whether or not you have a quest to finish in the area. As you wander you find letters, chapters from books, and various bits of history or stories or personal anecdotes that add so much more depth to the setting. I'm constantly learning more about the world of Thedas, and losing myself in it is so easy.

The characters are just as real and complex as the setting, and I love every single one of them so much. Except for Solas. He's a big giant jerkface and I am aggressively not doing any of his stupid personal quests. Go to the Hinterlands yourself, Solas, if it's so important! Cullen, though. And Josephine (Leliana calls her "Josie", kill me). And CASSANDRA can we talk about Cassie because she is the tank of my dreams and one of my favorite characters of all time even though I hated her in Dragon Age 2. And I can't say enough about Varric, who writes erotic friend fiction, and Vivienne calling you "my dear" and Dorian's fucking mustache, and the Iron Bull's whole crew, and SERA'S PRANKS, I just can't with any of these people! I would fight and die for them without blinking an eye. Leading an inquisition is so much easier when surrounded by a whole buncha lovable badasses.

There are still so many things I want to write but I don't want to spoil anyone, so I won't go into much more detail. I'm just... I'm so in love with this game and I'm not even done! This despite the fact that my heart was broken last night during one of the quests. I won't say why, but BioWare... I hate you. You are a pile of masochistic jerks. There was a choice I had to make, and it was so awful and heart-wrenching I literally had a panic attack. Like, I started hyperventilating and my hands went numb and started doing that clenchy thing lol so I breathed into a pillow until I "calmed down", which meant I still kept sobbing uncontrollably but at least my hands were working? Thank god for my friends, who were there through all of it, talking me down and reminding me that it would all be okay. Eventually.

Let's be real though, BioWare is the best thing to ever happen to gaming. Thank you for being so wonderful, you pile of masochistic jerks.

the real world sucks

Lately I've been completely immersed in the unreal. Well, take "unreal" as you will -- for me, worlds of the fantastical and the long past have always been more interesting and worth spending time in than the "real world," and in that sense feel more real to me than any ordinary earth existence could. So, in normal terms, lately I've been hanging around in some completely fake, made-of-pixels, fantasy worlds that are more fun to me than anything reality could offer. And it is glorious.

Most recently I've begun exploring the world of Mass Effect. This exploration immediately follows a full playthrough of Dragon Age: Origins and three playthroughs of Dragon Age 2, both of which take place in an epic fantasy pseudo-medieval world. So the transition from that to Mass Effect, a futuristic space fantasy (yes, I'd call it fantasy over sci fi, but that's debatable), was an abrupt one. That said, I'm finding myself completely at ease in this new world of high-speed transportation, slow elevators, and spaceships-as-cities. It was an immediate attraction, an almost drunken stagger of lust into this new world's arms, spurred primarily by the music on the game's main menu screen. From that moment, I knew this was going to be a beautiful foray into the truly spacey and fabulous.





Anyway, I digress -- kinda. This isn't a review of a game or anything; it's a review of the feelings that arise when I game. I feel wrong just calling it "gaming," because it's always more than that for me (well, sometimes it is just about gaming, when playing Tetris or Peggle for example, but it's actually impossible for those games to be much more than colorful shapes and balls bouncing around)-- it's an immersion into a story, another world, where the life of another person (or persons) becomes my own. Their history becomes my history, their worries are taken on as my own, and their life goals become as important to me as if they were part of my earth-bound existence.

When I was younger, around my early teen years, it seemed like everything I indulged in -- be it books, movies, games, or tv shows -- spoke to me on a deep emotional level, something that can't be described in words, especially not on this blog such as it is. Most of my favorite books of all time were read while I was a young teenager, books that could never impact me now the way they impacted me then. So when I discover something now that can affect me even a fraction as acutely as books and stories used to when I was younger, it means the world to me. That's one of the reasons I love Doctor Who so much, because it reaches me on a fundamental level that very few things reach in me these days. I really miss that feeling, the feeling that everything I took in meant something and would always mean something, and I feel like I've spent my life looking for the thing that will give that feeling to me, again and again, without diminishing returns. The Lord of the Rings is one of the things that makes me cry every time I read it or watch the movies, because I remember what it was like to feel it so deeply in my bones that it hurt. Nothing ever affects me like that story, and I doubt anything ever will.



What I love about Mass Effect, then, from literally like... the hour I've spent playing (I just started!), is that it appeals to the part of me that feels things like younger Meg used to feel. The music, Citadel, the fantastic space opera-ness of it all... it's magic. It makes me feel wonder again, like I'm about to embark on an epic adventure into the unknown. It excites me. And while that adventure may not be "real," by the definition of the term, it feels more real to me than anything I can touch in the physical world. So for me, it's real enough.