Dragon Age: Absolution

I've been a fan of DA universe since Origins was a new thing on the block. To be honest with you all I went into this expecting to hate it. Netflix has disappointed me more times than it pleased me statistically.

Once the credits rolled after the first episode I was ready to stop and leave a terrible review. It really was bad.

The first episode is the absolute definition of RUSHED. The entire episode felt like a recap of the previous season that you haven't watched. The pilot could have easily been split into two or even three episodes to properly establish the characters and what the main quest is. But instead we just got a TLDR of who is who and what the main objective is.

Decided to continue anyway cause I had nothing better to do with my evening. And I am glad I did because the other five episodes are much much better. The pacing is perfect, the story is entertaining, the characters are somewhat fleshed out.

So overall I am glad I decided to continue after the horrible first episode cause I did enjoy this. Is it the best thing since sliced bread? No. Not even close. Is it a fun and quick watch? Yes, it is. Even for the fans of this universe.

I'd give it a higher score if the first episode was split into two or three episodes as I said. But if they only got 6 episodes to work with and something had to be rushed I'm glad they decided to rush the intro so that the actual plot can have the proper pacing.

Now for the cast and VA. I adore Kimberly Brooks (Miriam), but not in this. All of her lines were emotionless and disconnected to what was happening on the screen. It honestly felt like she was bored to be there. And that's sad cause her character is the "protagonist" here.

I checked out the Japanese VA after I was done and that one did a far far far better job than what Kimberly Brooks did here.

Qwydion as a character didn't do it for me. She is only there to be a comic relief and nothing more. Japanese VA sounded marginally better for me.

Lacklon was amazing and I preferred the English VA much more.

Roland I also preferred as an English VA as well cause he had that "vague" French accent that everyone from Orlais has, which the Japanese VA doesn't do.

Rezaren I absolutely adored! Both the character and his English VA. Japanese VA makes Rezaren sound like your generic pure evil guy, which he is not.

And speaking of that, I never saw Rezaren as the villain. In fact I found our cast of characters to be the bad guys in this situation.

They were such troublemakers and an annoyance to a point where Rezaren simply had to resort to "going bad" in order to deal with all the trouble that they have caused.

Rezaren did nothing wrong.

While I enjoy the thedas-setting, the show itself feels very "generic". Obviously this isn't a project to the level of Arcane, but I was hoping it could contend with the likes of edgerunners or the legend of vox machina, but sadly... It is just lacking in every regard. Everything is "okay" but nothing except maybe the voice acting stands out. The main characters are one-dimensional, with the main character just always being so powerful and almost flawless that it's boring, while the rest of the gang gets very little to contribute outside their party-role.

Worth a watch if you enjoy dragon age, might improve in the future, just don't expect anything special.

The story is a little light but they pack a lot into the few episodes that there are. It's very short and I managed to watch it all in one session.

The action and animation is really quite good and the voice acting is surprisingly decent. So surely we have the makings of a great show?

I've seen some other reviews perfectly summarising the problem with this show; it feels like joining a DnD campaign halfway through the story. Although the characterisation is good, it's thrown at you all at once and doesn't really give you time to build empathy with the characters. The supposedly emotional scenes just seem to be lacking something, maybe the music? The music always seems so generic and barely appropriate for what is happening on screen.

Having said that the characters are all well written and make for a good dynamic in both action and dialogue.

An enjoyable series with fun action scenes and a compelling narrative. I hope Netflix stick with this one.

Big fan of the Dragon Age franchise. The strength of Dragon Age has always been its characters as in they usually carry their games, from Alistair to Morrigan, from Avaline to Varric to Blackwall to Viviane every game just has strong interesting diverse characters and that's what always keep me hung on.

Unfortunately this show didn't have any good characters, while some had moments, most of the characters had one architype. 'ME ANGRY, ME MAD AT STUFF'. This whole show just came off as super aggressive.

The lead character Mirium is just bitter and one dimensional and unlikable, and while I understand considering her upbringing, it just falls flat and you don't have enough investment to want her to overcome the horrors of her past, and this show actually got me to hate an Ashley Burch performance, I love Ashley Burch, she cannot do no wrong, and its not her fault, she did great with what she was given but I was not a fan of how this female Qunari was portrayed, she came off like some valley girl, or a forgotten cast member of Totally Spies disguised as a Qunari, it felt so out of place.

The other characters are not that great either, the dwarf was your typical headstrong dwarf stereotype, and you already had that with the lead too. Miriums love interest is also bland and has no personality except she loves the main character, also there is the ending that gives her some merit, but I'll get to that later.

The Villain of this show I liked at first before he was revealed as the villain, but his motivations for being a villain felt very weak, it just kind of happened out of nowhere, and I would have believed it if there was more build but it just happened too fast, especially when you consider where he started from and sure he is messing with blood magic and he is a Tavinter mage and Tavinter mages are known to be a-holes, I think they just wanted this charming bad guy, but he was neither convincing at either

The story was also so played out. Its been done to death so many times, while this adds nothing new. Not only that but I would be okay with played out plots but others have done it a lot better than this. A lot of the character motivation pop the hell out of nowhere. Also there is a big twist that happens with one of the characters and it just comes right the hell out of nowhere too, like I felt a lot of these reveals were like a kid writing a story saying 'and wouldn't it be good if this happened, and then this happened' on and on, to which it makes no real sense other than to happen for the sake of happening.

The animation also seemed to verge on many different styles, from bad CGI that looked really dated with the drawn animation and then sometimes the animation would flick to this anime style at times then back to western animation again. The art style really lacked an identity throughout, but I still liked it when it was good, but quality was very inconsistent at times, the backgrounds looked bland too, Dragon Age always has interesting locations, but here it felt like I had seen this in a lot of animations over the last 5 years.

The best part of the show was the ending, I liked Dragon Age 2 and that ending made me at least interested enough to watch season 2. (if it gets another season)

Overall a rough watch with some good animation (stressing 'some') but despite I hope this season is a learning experience for the team and they make something better with season 2.

Epic fantasy this is not. While Dragon Age: Absolution has some redeeming qualities, such as being fairly inoffensive, and an honest attempt at telling a fantasy adventure, for me it ultimately falls flat, and here's why:

The characters all talk as if they are 16-25 teenagers with a mix of fairly unbelievable bravado, or undeserved gravitas, so you just get the feeling that these characters are mediocre D&D Larpers.

Yeah this show just feels like a group of teenagers getting together to play a fairly mediocre D&D campaign. And well that's not very compelling.

Can't the script writers and voice actors make any attempt to sound medieval, instead of a load of 21st century hipsters in fantasy bodies? It just breaks the immersion for me.

The art work is okay though. Over all, inoffensive, but not interesting enough to keep my attention.