It’s often the case when reading a review of a longer game that you’ll see the phrase, “The first few hours struggle to get going,” or perhaps, “It takes a while to find its feet.” Which I think is enormously unreflective of the experience, and indeed the experience others will have when playing it. When other games regularly last five or six hours, an RPG having a poor opening five or six hours seems pretty hugely significant to me. And so it is that today I’m writing about the opening eight hours or so of Dragon Age II, before the improvements I’m already starting to see wash the memories from my head.

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