Case Study: Dragon Age 2
A case study of how Dragon Age II used the Heroine's Journey
The Start of My Yellow Brick Road
Jamie’s note: I played Dragon Age 2. It’s a BioWare RPG which means you can play as a man or a woman. I always play RPGs as a woman.
As a quick run down of the game, it’s a sequel to Dragon Age: Origins, and is set in a city-state named Kirkwall, as opposed to the kingdom of Ferelden in the first game. The player character is surnamed Hawke, and all of the characters will address your character as Hawke, regardless of what first name you make up for him or her.
When the game starts, Hawke, her mother, and her brother and sister are trying to escape an invasion of darkspawn in their hometown in Ferelden. In the game’s prologue, a sibling will be killed: the warrior brother Carver, or the mage sister, Bethany. Which one dies depends on which class — warrior, rogue, or mage — you are playing as.
The trajectory of Hawke’s external arc is that he or she will rise to the status of Champion of Kirkwall, a sort of official hero(ine) who protects the city. But there’s more to the character’s story than external glory.
Dragon Age 2 has a lot of flaws, which generated a lot of online articles about it. A comment on one such post led me to discover the existence of the Heroine’s Journey, because the comment copied and linked to Lara Crigger’s blog post at Gamasutra.com.
I disagree with Crigger’s conclusion that fan dissatisfaction was rooted in disdain for the Heroine’s Journey itself, so much as I think the story’s problems had to do with the execution of certain plot points. Nevertheless, her essay was very valuable to me in starting me on this quest to understand this type of character journey. As a writer, it helped me crack the code on the type of stories I like to write and read, which are often a combination of both the Hero’s and Heroine’s Journey. To me the richest stories combine both, but I was missing half of the journey until I found her blog post.
As a side note, Dragon Age II is not the only game that uses the Heroine's Journey structure. Variants of it are common to other games made by Bioware & Obsidian — the companies whose games I play the most — which I outline a bit in my post on the Reunification Journeys of Demeter & Isis. Check them out if you're curious.
Back on topic, I had to resurrect Crigger’s post via the Wayback Machine. Click the PDF button, which will open a lightbox. You can download or print the PDF if you wish.