Dragon Age 2: Bad Juju, Copout Ending
I’m having a hell of a time trying to get a handle on Dragon Age 2. I played it, I completed every single quest, I lived in Kirkwall for a couple weeks, I found myself with an emotional investment in the storyline–but I don’t think I liked it. It’s a damned perplexing game because it’s such an uneven experience. I don’t get the sense there was anyone overseeing the game and making sure it had a consistent tone.
Anyway, I’m going to eventually be reviewing it, but I’ve got a lot of random things I might want to address. So I’m going to be making a series of blog posts about different aspects of the game, and they’re going to be very spoilery. If you don’t want to be spoiled, finish the game then come back here!
The first major arc of Dragon Age 2 concludes with an expedition to the Deep Roads. One of the things you find in there is an idol made of pure lyrium–lyrium being Dragon Age’s macguffin that has mystical magical properties. This idol, the game makes clear very quickly, is Very Bad News. The guy who ends up owning it goes completely insane–performing atrocities and dark magic in his mansion. The game–perhaps rightly so–views the idol as unequivocally evil.
For all of the supernatural bad juju that the idol provides, however, the rest of the game deals with relatively more mundane matters–in fact, in practice the idol bits are more of a subplot. The meat of the game is dedicated to political conflicts, culminating in a huge battle between mages and templars. Being a mage, in the Dragon Age world, is a dangerous thing. One of the big temptations mages face is blood magic, which is your basic dark evil demon summoning magic (available to DA2 mages by simply spending a specialization point). Blood mages, like the idol, are Always Evil, and you fight several of them (and their associated demons) throughout the game. Magic does have its uses, however, and so to oversee the mages and make sure they’re not using blood magic, there’s a group of knights called the Templars.
The Templars vs. Mages conflict is Dragon Age 2′s major focus, and time and time again you’ll come up against different expressions of it. You’re constantly asked the question “Mages or Templars?” and the context in which that question is asked changes every time. You see templars relentlessly chasing mages even though they’re innocent–mages or templars? You see mages casting blood spells and summoning demons into the world–mages or templars? Characters point out that the entire reason the mages rebel is because they’re being dominated–mages or templars? Your character’s mother is murdered by a necromancer–mages or templars? In practice, it’s your typical almost cliche post-9/11 terrorism allegory: Do we give the government too much power in order to control the violent elements of the world, or do we allow more freedom even though it might make us more vulnerable? It’s not the most original treatment of the theme, but it’s nice to be able to make up your own mind and pick your own sides, and I appreciate that the game actively goes out of its way to avoid damning either side–it makes it very clear that both sides are equally right and wrong and your take on the conflict is a question of perspective rather than morality.
Except, in the ending it throws away all of that nuance for something a lot more straightforward. The head mage, in a move which contradicts every single speech he makes over the course of the game where he insists that only Really Bad Mages use blood magic and that not every mage will do that as their last resort, decides to use blood magic as a last resort and so you’ve got to fight him. (This entire sequence, by the way, is such an extreme bit of body horror and blood that I legitimately thought that I was in Dead Space 2–too bad I didn’t have the right stats to wear the DLC armor you get from registering DS2.) The head templar unsheaths her sword, and it’s been forged from the lyrium idol you found in the Deep Roads. (Somehow they’ve managed to increase the metal’s mass because the sword is much much bigger.) Her ruthless crusade against the mages is due to the corruption and insanity that she contracted from being around the artifact.
This is bullshit.
The game, for all it encourages you to, is careful to not choose a side. Except for the last hour or so of play, it’s impossible to tell how the designers would answer “mages or templars?” because they don’t have an answer. They see the strengths and shortcomings of each position. This is how it should rightfully be: It undermines the player if one side or the other is favored. And so, all of the game’s quests that ask the question divorce the question from morality. This is not a case where all of the “Nice” dialogue options are for the mages and the “Aggressive” ones for the templars, for example. It places these decisions in context, each time, so the “good” answers could favor either side. The game encourages you, rather than playing “saintly”, “evil”, or “neutral”, to pick a faction–mages or templars?–and to go with them for the rest of the game.
Where the game fails is in the ending. We’re constantly told that both sides are not only justified in their beliefs, but both even understand the other’s point of view–until the end, where both sides are shown to be morally unjustifiable. We’re allowed to side with the mages because their spokesman insists that blood magic is not magic’s inevitable result–and in the end, their spokesman turns to blood magic. We’re allowed to side with the templars because their decisions are based in a desire to help the greater good and to protect the populace–until we find out that their representative’s grabs to power were the result of possession by an evil sword spilling out bad juju. And so we really can’t follow the mages, because to support the mages is to accept a demonic influence. To support the templars is to condone the seductive murmurs of madness.
I almost wonder if they’re going for a “power corrupts” type of stance here…except again, nothing in the game seems to justify that. One of the characters in your party is a blood mage…and while her actions can (and, in my playthrough, did) leave some people in a worse state than they would have been in without her, that’s more due to her misguided naivete than it is a slippery slope of power. (I believe player actions have something to do with it–I ended up encouraging her to follow her instincts, which turned out to be completely wrong–it’s possible if I’d chastised her she could have had a happier ending.) And, I mean, I played a mage (who picked blood magic as a specialization) who attempted to do the right thing and used his power for the good of the city and in order to protect people to the extent that the game allowed me to. There’s no indication that my Hawke is going to turn into a demon at any point. The head templar even admits as much in one conversation–even though she’s aware that this Hawke is an apostate mage, he’s demonstrated by his service to the city that he’s not going to use his power for ill. (That he’s a local hero and his arrest would lead to immediate riots is another reason, of course.) The possibility of remaining uncorrupted exists and is available for anyone with strong convictions and with enough moral fortitude–traits that the head mage and head templar both share.
The scene where the head mage transforms into an abomination is intended to be shocking. It’s very dramatic and the resulting creature is fairly horrifying (it seems that Bioware borrowed one of Visceral’s monster designers for this–it looks straight out of Dead Space). The mage makes a big speech about how the Templars drove him to this–which is one of the arguments that’s been thrown around for most of the game. This particular character espouses this worldview! For him to suddenly resort to blood magic contracts his entire character. Rather than showing us depths that we didn’t expect him to have, it shows him to be extremely unprincipled–that he can’t live up to the morality he’s set up. I sided with this character because I believed him when he said that not all mages were like that. Having him change his mind in the end is a nasty little bait and switch.
The same is with the templars–when the head of the templars takes out her sword and we realize it’s been made of pure lyrium and Evil, it’s supposed to be a major reveal–So she was possessed the whole time!¬ Number one, the timing of this is suspect. Her persecution of mages starts from the beginning, and while it intensifies throughout the course of the game, it’s treated as a natural consequence of a vicious cycle–her and the mages stepping up their game in order to outsmart each other. You can’t say that the sword is the cause of her madness–storylinewise, it’s impossible for it to have passed into her hands until somewhere in between the second and third acts. The sword is unnecessary–it’s redundant. She would have started war between the mages and the templars with or without it.
And so making the mages and the templars Secretly Evil is a copout, a way for the game to end while disavowing any of the moral questions it has asked throughout. That the whole thing was caused by a Sword of Evil, that all mages are influenced by demons, that gets both mages and templars off the hook for their worldviews. Neither side is culpable for their abuses of power–it’s the fault of Evil Magic. Bioware doesn’t seem to realize that attributing everything to Evil Magic also undermines both sides. The mages can’t complain about being oppressed when the templars are justified in wanting to protect people from the inevitable blood magic. The templars can’t justify locking up mages when their orders come from a woman influenced by magic into sadism. Mages or templars? It doesn’t much matter. They’re all evil and you end up fighting both of them anyway.
Filed Under: Blog
