Play it Again, Suze

Deliberate misquoted blog title aside, do you often replay games or is it a case of once you’ve finished one, you never look back? I’m mainly thinking about games with a solo story/campaign mode, not games that you constantly return to because of the multiplayer factor.

The constant influx of new titles always means that there’s something fresh to add to the stack, so it’s not exactly necessary to keep revisiting titles. Sometimes, though, there is the rare game that people are willing to go back to more than once, but it has to be something pretty special in my case.

I’m not really one to replay games. After sinking long hours into a game, becoming involved in its storyline, characters and gameplay, finishing it is an accomplishment and the experience can be so singular that it’s not exactly easy to repeat. Take for example games like Okami and Fallout 3. The stories for these games are so epic and long that 40 hours completion time is the minimum if you’re doing it right. Some people can complete these games and then bundle straight back in, but I can’t. If I replay a game that substantial at all, it takes at least a few years before I do (case in point: Ocarina of Time).

The only exception is Dragon Age 2, and for me this is rather shocking. So far, I’ve done one playthrough as a female rogue Hawke, walking on the diplomatic/helpful path of course. That took nearly 50 hours within about two weeks. Then, having finished that first playthrough I immediately started another one: a male warrior Hawke who is being a total douchebag to everyone. He’s starting to soften up though after realising that he doesn’t actually want to make Varric his rival, of all people. Also, he’s probably falling in love with Fenris but I’ll stop before I start sounding like cringeworthy fanfiction.

I always thought that Mass Effect would be the first game that had that instant ‘replay factor’. After all, there are achievements for going through it more than once, mostly in the form of companion achievements that you get for completing ‘most’ of the game with a character in your party. But suddenly, going through all of that again just seemed too much. Go to Feros, Noveria, Virmire etc all again? Another 40 hours? No, it’s just too much. So I’ve only played through Mass Effect once.

After all the kerfuffle around Dragon Age 2, I was prepared to be disappointed. But it was fun, it had a good story, good gameplay and good characters. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it surprised me that after finishing it, it didn’t feel like I had spent that long running around Kirkwall at all. Perhaps because it’s quite clearly divided into acts that help mark exactly where you are in terms of progression and also because it’s limited to one city and its surroundings. Dragon Age: Origins in comparison had a whole land mass of problems and the weight of the world on your shoulders to boot.

Dragon Age 2 also surprised me because it didn’t seem like such a chore to play through it again. Fifteen hours in and my second Hawke is partly through Year Four (this is after sacrificing a total of eight hours of gameplay by restarting TWICE simply because damn Fenris is so annoying to romance) and I’ve got a third Hawke (female Mage, sarcastic/charming) in the early stages of Year One, this time with the exiled Prince which should be interesting. I wanted to play through it again. Although it’s not on the same epic scale of Dragon Age: Origins, it seems a lot more manageable and quicker because of it. You don’t feel like you’re sinking half your life into a game when it doesn’t involve so much trekking across a whole continent.

There has been a divide of opinion regarding Dragon Age 2 with its simplification of elements that people loved about Dragon Age: Origins, but I’m firmly in the camp that says Dragon Age 2 is awesome simply because I thoroughly enjoyed the game enough to want to play it three times. By the third completion, I’ll probably know the script off by heart and be able to draw the Hawke family emblem, blindfolded. Then maybe it will be time to revisit another epic adventure.