omg talk to me about Solas

[astolat]

I just finished my first Inquisition playthrough (as a female elven mage, romancing Solas). I love how this plays out with a Solas/Lavellan romance going (although I'm even more super mad about the party banter bug, however, because it's clear that I would have gotten so much more depth about Solas if I'd been hearing all his commentary. :'( I

Comments

[nausicaa83]

I literally just finished it, and oh my god. My brain still has to process everything. I'm so, so glad I decided to romance Solas on my first playthrough, it made the ending even more powerful to me. Also I loved their dynamic so much.

I'm convinced Flemeth sacrificed herself to lend the Dread Wolf her power as well. It never even occurred to me that he could be her new vessel. Not from the way they were talking before. But I wonder what she was doing with the Archdemon's soul before he arrived. Sending it through the mirror? Using it to change the mirror? I have to watch that scene again, as soon as my brain stops flailing and squealing and running in circles.

If I have to find one flaw with this game, I'd say the battle with Corypheus was too simple and short. I was over-levelled and playing on casual, sure, but he was definitely too easy to beat, considering how powerful of a menace he was. I think they should have gone the Origins way: a huge battle divided in various stages, with your party assigned to various portions of the city, and the different armies fighting alongside you along the way. Weirdly, we got something similar at the Temple of Mythal, even if on a very small scale, but nothing during the battle for the fate of the world.

But other than that, I loved everything and I want to hug everyone in my party. It kinda destroyed me to open the menu after the epilogue and finding Solas wasn't there... I even ran to his room to check, just in case!

We just had this game, and it's full of bugs and that stupid banter glitch (the war table trick fixed the music for me, but alas, no difference in the banter), and yet I already want the next one! What's going to happen next? What about Hawke? And what's Tevinter going to do? And will we have to fight Solas? I'm thinking 'yes', even though I'd much prefer to talk to him first at least...

I need fanfics, holy moley.

[nausicaa83]

Oh, and I just found this article that's pretty critical of the ending, and I must say it does raise some good points.

[astolat]

Yes, I completely agree -- the battle with Corypheus was totally uninteresting and didn't feel right at all. The whole "boss fight" mechanic is tired anyway and here was exceptionally so. I read that article too, that's the one that says that Corypheus should have attacked Skyhold itself, which is absolutely right.

IMO, there should've been some kind of macguffiny thing where he'd divided his power among say, two darkspawn generals plus the archdemon, and you had to assign different companions to different defensive positions and fought separate battles one with each set, with different allies available depending on whether you'd chosen mages or templars, Celene or Gaspard, Wardens or exile, and what missions you'd done.

Having done the customizations should have made a difference, having done war table missions should have been important, and for that matter, it would have been better to have a narrative reason to take a chunk of time after "The Last Piece" to do more side quests and build more power and influence.

Then defeating each "attack" and taking down the generals would have weakened Corypheus badly, and then beating him should've required imo instead doing something dramatic, like Solas running up and saying he's opening the Fade, he's going to rip the world apart, and you'd have to tackle him into the Fade personally and chase him down there with a sense of the world fraying and different characters you'd met appearing and speaking to you as you went, and then have the boss fight with "shadows" of your companions fighting with you.

ANYWAY, that's what *I* would have done. :P

But the last bit rescued the ending for me a lot because having Solas turn out to be secretly the not-quite-bad guy all along is a great twist and felt so emotionally powerful especially after having romanced him. If someone hadn't romanced him or at least made friends with him, I think it would feel a lot less satisfying, though. And I personally quite like that the game doesnt' feel "over" at the end -- I totally understand why someone wouldn't like that, why they'd want some big satisfying closure at the end, but for my part I really like that I get to imagine my Inquisitor going on and doing all sorts of things, with this looming secret shadow growing in the distance that is clearly going to be her problem to deal with very soon and emotionally painful.

[nausicaa83]

Wow, those are all amazing ideas. I can picture that final battle so clearly in my head, it would have been mindblowing. Me, I was shocked when we didn't get to fight him in the Fade. That seemed the only logical setting, and I thought it was implied all along. While I really liked The Last Piece, I think we should have kept that stage for Corypheus instead. All that talk of him hating the Inquisitor for stealing from him, all that personal hate, surely it should have led to some one-on-one stage of the final battle, with the party members rejoining you one after the other! And he should have had multiple forms too. The Fear Demon was a much better final boss!

I agree, though, that last bit with Solas was what made the ending for me. While the credits were rolling I was feeling so detached I actually checked my phone! I remember my first time with the DAO credits, two lines of This Is War in and I was sobbing. Big tears of happiness for having saved Ferelden and having done that wonderful journey. I felt nothing like that this time. And then Solas' scene came on, and I screamed and squealed and I was in awe and I started shouting at the tv "where's my sequel???". :D

Something I hadn't noticed before I read the article, though, is that the characters' plots do not, in fact, influence the ending at all. That's a huge flaw, it's true. I loved doing their plots, and found them all fascinating, but yeah, they didn't feel as important as the ones from previous games. This was the game where choices truly didn't make a difference at all. I think maybe the one truly important decision is whether the Inquisitor has a romance with Solas, because that opens up a whole window on his character that's completely lost to everyone else. By the way, did you have him remove your character's mark? Because at first I didn't want to, but then he convinced me to do it. She looks so strange without them! But I really love that scene even more considering what we know about him now!

Now that I think about it, it took me three hours this afternoon to do the Temple, meet Flemeth in the Fade, and beat Corypheus. It was really quite rushed. O_O

[astolat]

Yeah, it's really not good that the ending -- the whole endgame -- just doesn't change at all.

And my Inquisitor kept her vallaslin because in the end what mattered to her more was what it meant NOW, to her and her people, which was actually a symbol of community and adulthood and resistance to oppression. I was really happy with that choice afterward, too, because it fits with my feeling that she's breaking away from Solas's path -- that she's looking forward where he's looking back. :D

[nausicaa83]

Contrary to how I usually play Hawke, I roleplayed Lavellan a lot as if she were me (what would I have done in that situation?), and I remembered how, a few weeks ago, when I found out what kind of a person Marion Zimmer Bradley was, I had to throw away all her books. If I could, I would have burned them. And I loved those books. And yet, a couple of friends of mine didn't, saying they recognized the horror of what she had done, but that the books meant something to them, and they were able to separate those two things in their minds. Even if I respected that point of view, I couldn't truly understand it. So I realized that if it were me, I would have burned off the vallaslin from my face myself. And thus off it went.

It's unsurprising (and a bit worrying...) that the first thing that I loved about Solas was the fact that he was so fascinated by the past. It woke up the Archaeology graduate in me! "Oh please, do tell me more about ancient Elvhen practices and architecture" "we're in the middle of an apocalyptic war" "yeah yeah yeah, but what about their language? What about its ROOTS?"

:D