:) :DDD

haha. finally completed the game, at least for a first time. this nice story sure took quite a while to beat, and its only in normal mode.. we'll see when im imba enuf to up one difficulty level.

at first, i was only interested in this game since it got a nice 9.5 on gamespot, and after some grinding in a few MMOs, i tot it would be nice to change my attention to my fav genre of games: simply RPG. to my surprise, the quality of the game exceeded my already high expectations, and its a must-try for all RPG lovers :D

even before this playthrough, i chose a city elf rogue. but it was pretty tough to start as a rogue in this complex game, so after a while, i switched to a mage.. which was a pretty obvious drop in difficulty. Mages are rly imba in this game. holy.

well, 6 types of orgins to choose from: city or dalish elf, human noble or magi and 2 more dwarf ones which i din bother. i always disliked the dwarf race in games, dunno why. maybe cos they have simply no hope of ever becoming an adonis (99% of the time i try my best to maintain fashion sense on my chars. a balance between eye candy and armor stats is impt for me) with their trademark low stature and thick wadeva color moustache and beard and urksss...

the classes and skills, on the other hand i found it okay, nothing really fascinating about the structure, but its still good. some skills are quite complicated and i juz din bother to learn or use them. but they may be useful in the hands of a seasoned player or at higher difficulty levels; but oh well, i hacked and slashed through with the staple aoe and tank builds.

4 person in the team is juz nice in my opinion. a tank, a mage, a healer and a rogue (in my case an archer) worked for me. although some might sub the heal for another dps or aoe mage for a berserker, but i din wna pull any stunts on my first serious play. one lesson learnt is to learn stealing and max lockpicking asap as that rly saves u from a lot of heartache, plus a nice boost to gold.

the wonderful aspect about this game is more towards its VERY rich background and content. the lore is magnificent to explore, additionally in the optional codex form (which i opted not to read every of the hundreds of entries about every significant character or monster) and side quests. one thing that guaranteed at least a second playthrough is the nature of the conversations and plot development. one is presented with tens to hundreds of combinations of conversation directions with npcs that it is just impossible to explore every possibility that the plot can develop. the interest catch is oftenly, once u choose this thing to say, lets say, we be a little mean in the tone, it is very likely that we will juz end up in a fight and kill an important npc (possibly a recruitable char) or destroy important leads to unlock some mystery that we are all curious about.

being a mage, although decreases the general difficulty, led me to be unable to discover many fun parts of the game. as we all know, mages have low strength and care nuts about cunning or dexterity. hence, further plot deviations or fun dialogue options which involves intimidating (req high strength) or persuasion (req cunning) cannot be performed with success. lol, and thats why at this point of typing, my newly created human noble rogue is already created and into the start of the game.

some classes or char are good for some stuff, while others are not. one interesting occasion was when i was ambushed by 20+ archers and soldiers. any sane person would know that an aoe spell here will work fine, and so i was super excited and started launching my fireball. that was when the aggro caught up to my mage and slaughtered her. mouth gaping open and not reacting to this situation, my archer and healer were slain too. but in the end my tank ended up killing the remaining 15+ enemy shitzos, solo. due to his ghey physical resistance of 70+, they were hitting him 1 damage at a time while i hack 40+ out of them a hit. might as well juz send him in rite, the others can rest. but juz as i thot my tank was invincible, i sent him into battle to duel loghain in the most impt quest in game. =.=" my poor alistair (the tank) was slain in like 7 seconds lol. reload and sent my mage in, killed loghain in 15 secs. haiz. learning the hard way.

storyline is great, M18 plot, because of the violence and lust. oh yea, and char development packs some interesting stuff too :) not only do they level up, its best to raise their approval rating of u (the main character), so that additional quests/dialogues/plot can be revealed. my alistair fell in love with me and wynne (the healer) and leliana (the archer cum lockpicker) had approvals of 100. high approval from morrigan unlocked her personal quest, which is yum! got to fight the only other big, grown dragon apart from the last boss. its a pity i hadnt explored other chars like sten and oghren. can invite those who fell in love with u into ur tent also, haha and guy-guy/girl-girl combis are possible :P shit i havent tried that.

yay! so in conclusion, this is a really great game that even stopped my tracks in FF9 on my PSP and halted my MMO spree. next step would be to finish another playthrough with a rogue, which i believe would be another brand new interesting journey to embark on; or i can simply move on to the expansion: Dragon Age Origins - Awakening.

cya :)