Dragon Age

[Mx.Silver]

I dunno, I think the medium changes things a little. If the point of a tragedy is to make the audience feel sad or depressed, DA2's "tragedies" fails at doing this

Surprisingly enough, given what I said earlier, I didn't find DA2 particularly tragic either. However, this isn't because of 'player agency' and but the result of other elements of the game.

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For a start, Hawke's not really much of a character in his/her own right. More importantly though is that when you look at the tragic events of Hawke's life the most obvious thing they all have in common is that Hawke comes out of them sad, but fundamentally ok enough to get on with things. This holds true for most of the NPCs as well, aside from the mages, who by are likely to end the game in a better position than they entered it. Even Betheny/Carver can come out of things reasonably alright

Basically, my point is that if you want to attack DA2's tragic effectiveness it's better to stick to actually valid targets rather than resorting to the 'player agency' card. I mean, yeah that scene in Bastion worked well, but then so did a lot of the tragedy in Shadow Hearts 2 and that game has very little player agency at all. The ending of the first Fallout also derives most of it's effectiveness because it happens regardless of what the player's done in the game.