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My preferred example of this is Dragon Age 2, which deserves a longer post than I can make right now, but which I much prefer to read as a tragedy, and therefore is accentuated and heightened by 'bad' decisions.
I think DA2 is a tragedy even if you play it 'optimally', for the best outcomes. Even in the best possible version, DA2 is a story about Hawke, the protagonist, seeking his/her fortune in a new city, rising from a penniless refugee to the height of political power, and none of it being worth a damn. No matter how good your decisions, or how diligent you are about sidequests and doing all the content, the city of Kirkwall is doomed to descend into anarchy and civil war. It does not matter how good your judgement is, or how canny a political operator, or even how skilled you are with a sword. The forces of social division and entropy tearing this city apart were set long before you ever arrived. Moreover, no matter your choices, you are going to lose friends and loved ones. This city will chew up and destroy everyone you ever cared for.
In some ways I see the game summarised well in the character of Gamlen. Gamlen is the player character's uncle, someone you were hoping to make contact with and ask for help in your desperate flight at the start of the game. Instead you discover that he is a washed-up drunk and a gambler, who has lost the family's wealth and even sold their estate to cover his debts. It is easy to feel contempt for him as you set about rebuilding the fortune and reclaiming your estate.
Even so, by the conclusion of DA2, well, at least one of your siblings has been killed by monsters, the other has either been killed by monsters or has been lost to you by joining/being-conscripted-into an isolated organisation of fanatics, your dead father's legacy is in disgrace, your mother has been murdered by a serial killer, and your friends have mostly fallen apart as well. By the end of the game I wanted to head down to Lowtown and say to Gamlen, "...I get it now. Pass me a bottle."
If you try your hardest to make optimal choices you can take the edge off the tragedy a little, but to me that always feels like missing the point of the game. Both your siblings should die. Merrill should end up killing her entire clan. Isabela should end up fleeing the city, feeling guilty and abandoned, while the qunari burn the city searching for a book that isn't even there. Anders should die on a bloody block, killed by someone he thought was a friend. This is miserable, but the game is about misery.
DA2 is a game about losing what you love, about betrayal, and entropy, and being the last one standing, hands covered in blood, amid the burning wreckage of everything you were trying to defend. The more strongly that theme comes through, the better and more affecting the game is, and that means that I think the 'good' choices, which let you salvage small bits of success from amid the wreckage, make the game weaker as a whole. DA2 is, unavoidably, a game where you the player lose. Kirkwall defeats you. The game is better if it leans into that.
Another point of comparison might be Rannoch in ME3, which I notice you didn't mention. I think the Rannoch section works vastly better if, in the end, only one race can survive. I have my objections to the actual writing of the Rannoch segment, which is mostly bad, but I like the final choice. The quarians will survive or the geth will survive. Choose. It is a genuinely difficult and even heartbreaking choice. Unfortunately, BioWare are cowards and give you an option to just save everyone, which I think is frankly pretty pathetic.
To an extent I have the same objection to Tuchanka. Both Tuchanka and Rannoch have more-or-less the same premise. You have two very sympathetic characters, Wrex/Mordin and Tali/Legion, both of whom are fan favourites, both of whom the player has probably come to really care about in previous games, and who are on opposite sides of a contentious, morally complicated issue. Wrex wants to cure the genophage; Mordin wants to preserve it. Tali wants the quarians to survive and prosper; Legion wants the geth to survive and prosper. They cannot both get what they want. The case for each side has been made to you at length by a sympathetic, emotionally compelling character. Now choose.
Unfortunately in both cases ME3 wimps out. For Tuchanka it just has Mordin change his mind and become anti-genophage despite that being the opposite of his position in ME2; and for Rannoch it just lets you convince the geth and the quarians to put a history of genocide behind them and make up. You can argue Mordin changing his mind is justified if you pushed him in that direction in ME2, but he changes his mind even if in ME2 you encouraged him to believe that what he did was right and justified. It reminds me of how Garrus in ME2 is always a rogue who's quit C-Sec to become a vigilante, even though his entire character arc in ME1 was about choosing whether to go rogue or play it straight and stay in C-Sec, and both options were supported there. There are a lot of places where BioWare handles player choice very well, but that just makes these failures all the more jarring, especially when they go against the ME series' promise to give you genuinely hard choices. What is the point of promising hard decisions if the games are always going to back out and give you a third option? The golden routes are BioWare losing their nerve and failing their own games.
I have similar vibes on DA2, including empathy for Gamlen. Who- despite being the character encouraged to be viewed with contempt- is a bit of a tragic character in his own right who was the unfavored child who none the less shared what he had when his long-absconded sister showed up asking for aid.
For ME3, I think the Rannoch arc is one of those where it gets much, much better if you let a ME2 character die. Namely, Legion. With Legion, the Geth are cast as extremely sympathetic 'we didn't mean to do that / we don't want conflict.' Without Legion, the ME3 Geth are just as much the original victims, but far more menacing.
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Dragon Age 2 really is BioWare’s best ever game. Even while playing recent highly rated RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk I come back to it as a far better written and interesting story, with better and more meaningful choices (the levels are copy-pasted, but the game is reactive in a way the others either aren’t or play for laughs). The decline in writing afterwards (and it really was many of the same people who wrote Inquisition and Veilguard, so it can’t be explained away by staffing changes) beggars belief. The final conversation with Gamlen in Act 3, where you’re both trying to somehow find a little meaning in this extraordinary tragedy (which I like to think ends, in Inquisition, with the final extinguishing of the Hawke line), and really in life itself, and it all feels so pathetic, is just extraordinary. I could probably quote half the game from memory. Other games have their moments; if you play Witcher 3 with the Yennefer relationship there is something of the world-weary love story of two people who have known each other for a long time that I love, and I think the epilogue in the DLC is sweet without being saccharine. But yeah, Dragon Age 2, man, makes me want to drop everything and play it again right now.
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Nothing much to say except awesome analysis. I quite liked DA2 despite the copy-paste, the scaling of it worked well and the characters were great. But your write-up is better.
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